Ask HN: Visualizing software designs, especially of large systems (if at all)?
by lovehatesoft on Hacker News.
I learned about UML in a course, but have never used it or seen it in practice as a junior developer. Sometimes I’ll see a flowchart, but that’s not too common. Is this the same in other companies? With some of our code, the designers are either gone or sometimes unavailable, and it can be tricky to see how all the pieces fit together. A good IDE makes the job a little easier (finding references, ctrl+click to go to declarations, etc.), but it’d be nice to have a diagram or something for visualization. So, is it a good idea to try documenting the code design through some sort of visualization? If so, using UML or something else? I suppose there might be tools for doing this automatically in some languages? Otherwise I think if it was valuable enough, it could be something we make sure to review and update along with code changes. Any thoughts would be appreciated!