Blog
Notes on describing software systems: structure, behavior, and deployment. Most posts carry a live diagram — you can explore it in place, or open it in the designer and make it yours.
I kept redrawing the same three diagrams, so I built a tool
Every team I worked with needed the same three pictures — how the system is structured, how behavior flows through it, and where it runs. I got tired of redrawing them. CRAYON-C4 is the result, and it's now open for early users.
The C4 model, explained with one online store
What the C4 model is, why levels of zoom beat one big diagram, and how a context view and a container view answer different questions — walked through on a small web shop you can explore live.
Four diagrams, four questions — draw each to its intent
Each C4 diagram has one job — a question it answers and a kind of detail it must refuse. A close look at the context, container, component, and code diagrams, and the anti-pattern of letting deployment leak into an abstraction.