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Zach
Zach

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Whiteboarding and Visualization tools

I am B-E-A-T after this long day.

Last night ended late after struggling and fighting through a tough sprint. This morning picked up a couple hours early from where the previous night ended. And I'm paying the price now.

C'est la vie. We got the work done. Today was tough. But it was a good day.


I thought I'd share some tools that I've found - one that I've used and one that I plan to.

Excalidraw.com

A site that allows you to draw simple shapes, lines, numbers, and freehand, to create diagrams and illustrations.

I first saw the site in a help-desk ticket for a pair programming assignment. So much of coding is visualization, and with a few simple strokes, our help desk ..uh helper(?) created a diagram that we used to break down the tree data structure and step-through the problem-solving process.

I've used it since, and it's great. Simple tools can be the most powerful, and this fits that axiom. There might be more functionality deeper than I've explored, but being able to create attractive shapes and manipulate them in basic ways, was something that I had been wanting and this app delivers.

Draw.io

A diagraming and workflow tool. I'm less familiar with this one as I haven't used it yet, but it looks like it makes charts of all types and workflow diagrams simple to create.

You can see it in action here, in my classmates blog, Darion Builds.

Alt Text

I read his post and had to know what tool he used to create his diagrams. That's how I found draw.io.

In the last week before the bootcamp began, I thought that I'd use a tool like that here, in this blog, to illustrate and record my daily or weekly workflows and learning process. But the schedule is so fast and so congested, there hasn't been time to do that. I still think it'd be a cool element to add to this project, but it's on the back-burner until (and if) time frees up.

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