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Making Diagrams Fun With Mermaid

Ozan Tunca
Better Programming
Published in
7 min readJan 19, 2020

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Photo by Andrew Buchanan on Unsplash

If you’ve studied software engineering in a traditional way and had some experience in the industry, you might be wondering how I can use “fun” and “diagrams” in the same sentence. Give me a few minutes of your time and you’ll learn how.

Do We Really Need Diagrams?

It is easy to overlook diagrams when you’re working at a non-corporation. Diagrams are often used in corporate companies with many teams, departments, engineers, outsourced resources, and complicated legal obligations.

In such cases, they’re often used as bureaucratic tools rather than as a way to transfer knowledge. This made hundreds of engineers I’ve worked with hate diagrams as a way to document things.

Yet, we still draw diagrams on whiteboards when we’re onboarding new teammates, discussing new architecture ideas, or presenting the roadmaps of our projects.

That’s because, sometimes, it’s nearly impossible to explain things with words.

Below is a flowchart from Slack that presents the app and decides whether to send a notification or not.

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