Category: Diagrams

Building Wardley Maps using Graphviz

~ chriseyre2000 ~ 2 Comments

This is a more advanced example of using grapviz to build a wardley map.

This is a wardley map generated from Graphviz.

It’s not a very good map, as it’s not trying to solve a real problem. This is mostly to see if I can use graphviz to display this.

The next example is more realistic.

Cup of tea wardley map

This is one of Simon Wardley’s simple examples where a tea shop has built a custom kettle.
It’s a great example of demonstrating that you are possibly doing something wrong in an obvious manner.

The source for this diagram is here: https://github.com/chriseyre2000/diagrams

How to Document Microservices

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment

Here is a great article on using dot to document microservices:

https://articles.microservices.com/an-alternative-way-of-visualizing-microservice-architecture-837cbee575c1

I have forked and extended the gist to:

This is all you need to generate the below image from the above text:

dot architecture.dot -Tpng > architecture.png

You can even add annotations to the lines by adding [label=”My Link”] to the connection before.

These are ideal to add to the README.md of github projects.

I especially like the idea of having a diagram with the source to create it under source control.

This requires you to install graphviz which can be done:

# Mac
brew install graphviz

# Windows
choco install graphviz

# Linux
sudo apt-get install graphviz

For the purists who want to keep their machines clean:

# Docker
cat file.dot | docker container run --rm -i vladgolubev/dot2png > file.png