I'm struggling with brain cramps trying to understand something my past self wrote. Current me needs to go outside and do something that doesn't involve software or complexity. Sadly, current me is trying to make one small change and it feels like the software has passed out of the realm …

When I started in this business I was given a flowcharting template.

See https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/flowcharting-templates. I'm pretty sure I had one of these: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_690078.

Since then, things have changed a little.

I fondly recall using the Rational Rose …

I'm a big fan of plain-text tools. Source Code. ReStructuredText. LaTeX.

I'm not a big fan of proprietary file formats and document formats that are difficult or impossible to decode. JSON and XML rock. .XLS files are painful and difficult to work with.

UML Diagrams are a particularly odious problem …

Searched for this the other day. Came up empty. Clearly, didn't search hard enough.

Automatically Generated Python Code from an UML diagram? So far, there are three separate answers listing a total of five separate products.

I really want to annotate the UML with docstrings. If that was supported, it …

Saw a horrifying design document recently. One that was at the "gouge out my eyes" level of badness. That's one step below "drink until I forget what I saw", but one level above "beat the author with a tire iron."

They were -- I'm guessing here -- trying to develop their own …

One issue in creating a database design is working around the limitations inherent in the SQL data model. I'm going to call it the SQL model because you can make the case that the entity-relationship (ER) model is an abstraction and could have a far more expressive implementation. I'm going …