I just had an epiphany.

I thought that I was infatuated with Microsoft Visio because I liked drawing pretty pictures. And while people seemed to like the pictures I drew, I always felt slightly silly because ultimately all I was doing was drawing pretty pictures.

I just finished drawing a multi-server, multi-silo, multi-site application that I knew nothing about before 72 hours ago, from the power cords into the walls to the networks to the logical application flow. I looked at the document and realized that I didn’t love Visio because of the pretty pictures, I love it because, when I am able to produce that pretty picture, it means I understand the thing I am modeling 100%, top to bottom. And that’s a feeling I don’t have to feel silly about.