Whenever someone presents a flow diagram to describe software or infrastructure, I pretty much panic. It always seems like everyone in the room immediately understands this kind of thing, but to me every box and line and arrow looks like sheer ambiguity.

I tend to think in bulleted lists. Programs are a series of steps, often containing substeps and branches. Infrastructure allows data (requests) to traverse a series of steps as well. Each branch of steps and substeps looks like a bulleted list in my head.