Avi Flax on Data Driven Diagramming

For our next meetup, we are happy to host Avi Flax who will walk us through his ideas on Data Driven Diagramming!

Abstract:

The Clojure community generally believes that everything that can be expressed as data generally should be, which yields many benefits.

Why then are we still drawing our system architecture diagrams with tools and opaque binary formats that can capture only lines and boxes, rather than using accessible data that captures the full semantics of the domain, as we do in the business systems that we build?

The meager information that is in most diagrams today is nearly impossible to reuse or leverage, leading to duplicative work, data drift, and out-of-date documentation.

In this talk I will describe many problems with the way system architecture is generally conveyed, and how many of those problems can be ameliorated by expressing our diagrams as data.

Finally I’ll show the (Clojure+FLOSS) tools and approach I’ve developed for defining our diagrams as data, and show people how easy it would be for them to get started doing the same.