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      <p><a href="/daily/2024/08/16/what-are-err--req-and-res">Whilst mentoring at the School of Code Hackathon</a>, something the team and I discussed was documentation and documenting any decisions we made about the approaches they were taking, the techologies to use, etc.</p>

      <p>We kept it simple by adding this to a README file, but I also mentioned <a href="/daily/2022/09/23/adrs-technical-design-documents">ADRs and technical decision documents</a> and how they can be written in Markdown and stored alongside the code in the same repository.</p>

      <p>Another approach to documentation that I like is to create diagrams and flow charts.</p>

      <p>I've used various tools to do this, but recently, I've started to use <a href="https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid">Mermaid</a>, which is a Markdown-like syntax to generate charts and diagrams.</p>

      <h2 id="here%27s-the-thing">Here's the thing</h2>

      <p>There are online tools to do this, but there's also <code>mmdc</code> command-line tool that generates diagrams locally.</p>

      <p>This means that I can easily generate diagrams and store in the codebase too, and have them version-controlled so I can see the history as they evolve during the project.</p>

      <h2 id="want-an-example%3F">Want an example?</h2>

      <p><a href="https://github.com/opdavies/build-configs/blob/f02fce7ff5b5cff202ec8b893a4b3c7e7c56f3c4/docs/diagram.mmd">Here's one I did for the Build Configs tool</a>, which I recently open-sourced, and that GitHub renders by default (you can click the 'Code' tab to see the code for the chart).</p>

              
    format: full_html
    processed: |
      <p><a href="/daily/2024/08/16/what-are-err--req-and-res">Whilst mentoring at the School of Code Hackathon</a>, something the team and I discussed was documentation and documenting any decisions we made about the approaches they were taking, the techologies to use, etc.</p>

      <p>We kept it simple by adding this to a README file, but I also mentioned <a href="/daily/2022/09/23/adrs-technical-design-documents">ADRs and technical decision documents</a> and how they can be written in Markdown and stored alongside the code in the same repository.</p>

      <p>Another approach to documentation that I like is to create diagrams and flow charts.</p>

      <p>I've used various tools to do this, but recently, I've started to use <a href="https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid">Mermaid</a>, which is a Markdown-like syntax to generate charts and diagrams.</p>

      <h2 id="here%27s-the-thing">Here's the thing</h2>

      <p>There are online tools to do this, but there's also <code>mmdc</code> command-line tool that generates diagrams locally.</p>

      <p>This means that I can easily generate diagrams and store in the codebase too, and have them version-controlled so I can see the history as they evolve during the project.</p>

      <h2 id="want-an-example%3F">Want an example?</h2>

      <p><a href="https://github.com/opdavies/build-configs/blob/f02fce7ff5b5cff202ec8b893a4b3c7e7c56f3c4/docs/diagram.mmd">Here's one I did for the Build Configs tool</a>, which I recently open-sourced, and that GitHub renders by default (you can click the 'Code' tab to see the code for the chart).</p>

              
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