When getting into the internals of software systems developers can greatly benefit from visual aids. We will demonstrate tools and techniques maintainers can use to easily create diagrams visualizing (components of) their software, aiding potential contributors (and themselves) in future explorations.
A wide variety of textual diagramming languages are available across various language ecosystems (e.g. Mermaid, PlantUML, ditaa, etc.). These diagrams tend to be well readable in their textual form and can be easily turned into nice looking images where richer representations are available. This makes these languages particularly well suited for the documentation of software. The corresponding diagrams can be defined close to source code making them readily available, while also looking good in rendered documentation.
Although these languages can always be used to generate the desired diagrams in an ad-hoc manner, having a tight integration with a language and its tools decreases the maintenance burden. This poster will demonstrate some tools and techniques to achieve this integration.