System Design

Hand-Authored System Diagrams

Each portfolio piece renders a small, hand-laid {nodes, edges} diagram linked by a CMS key — node colour encodes role, the left-to-right layout tells the story, and the same data contract powers both these and the 400-node map.

  • Frontend
  • Product Engineering
  • Data Visualization
  • System Design
  • React
  • Component Libraries
  • TypeScript

Overview

  • Where the mental map is big and auto-laid-out, a system-design diagram is the opposite: small, deliberate, and explanatory. A good architecture sketch isn't force-directed noise — the position of each box and the colour of each node mean something. So these diagrams are hand-authored in the repo, with positions placed by hand to read left-to-right as a flow.

  • The interesting tension is keeping a code-authored diagram editable-by-reference from the CMS without dragging the graph runtime into the admin bundle — solved with a string-only key contract and a registry that resolves it at render. The three brand hues are reused here as a semantic encoding (entry, processing, store), and the whole thing degrades gracefully if a key ever goes stale.

System Design