I don't think it's a joke, though.

One thing I miss about in-office work is that people would spontaneously draw diagrams in meetings. The same diagrams would get drawn over and over again, evolving. And everybody did it, so everybody was rehearsing the architecture in their heads and had a basic grasp of it. It was like a tribe singing the same songs over and over again, trying out variations and evolving the “official” version over time.

This doesn’t happen (IME) with remote work. Drawing diagrams takes for-fricken-ever so people tend not to do it in meetings. Best case, someone shows up with a diagram, and it stays up while people talk about different ways of doing it, and after the meeting someone makes the changes that were suggested.

It really lacks the collaborative value of someone walking up to the whiteboard and saying “what if we did this,” not hesitating to make changes because they can do it in ten seconds and then wipe out their changes and redraw the original in few seconds if they want.

When somebody starts making changes to a diagram in a remote meeting, it’s a sign you’re going to be there for a long, long time.

Take a picture of a hand drawn diagram and just paste the image.

Sure it's not vectored but wiki is, well, quick wiki-wiki.

That's a reference I haven't seen in over a decade. Nice!

I agree. I’m a big fan of remote working in general but with current tools we’ve definitely lost something in this area. The practical utility of just having a huge whiteboard on the wall that everyone can see with a bunch of different coloured pens that anyone can pick up is enormous.

I hope the next generation of conferencing apps will provide shared “whiteboard” spaces as standard. Extra points if they can effectively use tablets (thinking Wacom not iPad here) so everyone can just sketch out ideas quickly and collaboratively again, and if it also provides useful and rapidly accessible tools for things like saving interesting work, editing and moving things around, and retrieving something you were looking at earlier in the discussion. I suspect there’s a significant opportunity here, a chance to fix one of the legitimate criticisms of WFH. Certainly among the smaller businesses I tend to work with, I could imagine any remote conferencing tool that got that right first would rapidly expand its market share.

Digital whiteboards aren't great, but they are useful. Interestingly though they dont' seem toe be used quite int he same way.

I still insist that for my teams all rooms that get used for meetings, formal or informal, have at least 1 big whiteboard. It's always paid off, and as you and GP note - nothing in WFH tooling quite works.

Hell, I've had team members WFH put a whiteboard in their house and an extra camera to show it; with mixed success. It's not collaborative, which reduces value. Tablets too. The workflows are all so-so.

To the extent that this is true, I don’t think I’ve ever seen them used routinely in any team or organisation I’ve worked with. I believe a large part of this is because no-one has yet found a way to use a keyboard and mouse as quickly/casually/effectively as good old pen and paper (or, in this case, marker and whiteboard). Given that so much of our work now happens remotely, I’m a little surprised that stylus-friendly devices haven’t caught on more.

I have seen teams using these whiteboard tools to good effect, but they aren't used the way a whiteboard would be, typically.

Stylus friendly devices don't solve the whole thing either.

Maybe not today, but if everyone had stylus+pad and knew how to use the related software/UI, what else do you think would be useful?

We never found a workflow that fully replaced taking turns drawing on a (shared) whiteboard.

Some people found the tools really pretty usable, so for them it was great for drawing a quick sketch and sharing with people, but it was always a bit clunky compared to physical pens. Oddly (perhaps?) some of the team were very self-conscious about drawing while others watched, more so than in person.

After a while we realized that some of the team was disengaging from the rest of conversation while sketching, in a way that noodling on paper didn't' seem to. Maybe because they were in a different physical space, so when eyes were focused on the drawing, there wasn't really much connection (other than audio)

Scaling is a problem in than nothing on a monitor seems to work as well on multiple scales as a big ass whiteboard. I mean, you can certainly represent more scales digitally, but you are pan-and-zooming all the time. The "single picture" part didn't seem to work as well.

Another thing is that we never found a digital place that has the same mental priority as big whiteboard in the common area. There was a lot of "where did we put that, is it attached to meeting or on the folder X or ...

On the whole I thought it was more positive than negative, but over time they were definitely being used less and less.

A couple of the team absolutely loved them for diagramming and completely replaced other tools for that.

To be fair, it was a "forced experiment" during covid lockdowns initially, so could certainly have been executed better.

However, there's skill involved, and you really want that multi touch+pen input.

Zoom in to write text, zoom out to draw boxes, move the canvas around, etc. Also, having a colour pallet, since that's designed into whiteboard markers for you, where digital systems give you a billion bad options

I got a laptop with a touch screen and baked in stylus. Screen share + paint is my white board. I can screenshot them and dump them into our chat logs. Works pretty well and people do seemingly find it charming.

'One thing I miss about in-office work is that people would spontaneously draw diagrams in meetings.

The same diagrams would get drawn over and over again, evolving. And everybody did it'

I miss in online meetings the start with and highlevel outline diagram, and fill in different detailed sets depending on the conversation.

I like plantuml, but it's hard to do that as fast as a white board.

Also I found that repitionion of explaining your system to multiple sets outsiders really helper refine the content.

I personally find it far quicker to use the visual aid than learning a new syntax etc.

I had a better experience using plantML for sequence diagrams. The task is easier so the output of the interpreter is typically useful without manual interventions.

I found their Lite container version perfect for local iteration on diagrams: https://docs.structurizr.com/lite/quickstart

That way in an editor like VSCode (e.g. where you have/make plugins to support) you can live preview the diagram in your editor while editing the related text - both get syntax highlighting etc. Using a tool like sphinx to tie everything together helps, as you can easily (enough) write extensions to handle quirks of your own setup reasonable if needed.

I've seen this work pretty well, in a /doc folder in the git repo with some autogenerated reference links as well, from the same repo. You either need the plantUML jar file local (and java, obv) or to point it at a rendering instance "local enough".

[1] https://github.com/plantuml-stdlib/C4-PlantUML

Sometimes you're only sketching something out to think things through and you'll get rid of it after 20 minutes.

But if at other times, if you've got reference material that's being used to onboard people or explain your system to other teams, etc. that hour spent creating something more understandable probably pays dividends & worth the effort.

It's like an ugly UI. It may be ugly but the people who use it, know it. When you "clean it up" you've now disrupted their mental models and they have to re-learn it all over again.

If you want people to look at a diagram and see stuff in it, rather than brush it off by familiarity, you want to move some boxes around.