Guides

Short, practical writing on drawing architecture clearly, and on getting the most out of ArchBoard.

• How to Draw a System Design Diagram

  A practical walkthrough for drawing clear system design diagrams: choose boundaries, label data flow and show scale and failure modes in ArchBoard.

• Diagram DSL: Draw Architecture from Text

  The ArchBoard diagram DSL: nodes, edges, labels, replicas, layouts and a dozen copy-paste examples. Type text and get an editable, auto-laid-out diagram.

• Choosing the Right Diagram Type

  Architecture, sequence, data flow, entity and deployment diagrams answer different questions. Learn which to draw and when to combine several.

• Drawing a Microservices Architecture

  Show service boundaries, data ownership, sync and async calls clearly in a microservices diagram, without drowning the reader in a tangle of arrows.

• Diagrams for System Design Interviews

  How to use a whiteboard in a system design interview: a repeatable drawing order, what to label, and how to keep the picture clean while you talk it through.

• Back-of-the-Envelope Estimation

  Estimate traffic, storage and bandwidth for a system design in minutes. A simple method, the numbers worth memorising and how to show them on your diagram.

• Using Mermaid with ArchBoard

  Import Mermaid flowcharts as editable shapes and export a selection back to Mermaid text. What converts well, what does not and how to keep diagrams in sync.

• Offline-First, Private Diagramming

  How ArchBoard keeps diagrams on your device: local storage, no accounts, no tracking, and how to back up, move and share work without any server involved.

• Diagramming Event-Driven Systems

  Show producers, topics, consumers, retries and replays in an event-driven architecture diagram so the flow of events stays understandable as the system grows.

• Presenting Architecture Diagrams

  Turn a diagram into a talk: use frames as slides, speaker notes, a laser pointer and a PDF handout, all from one canvas and without leaving the editor.

• Sharing Diagrams Without a Server

  Create encrypted share links, read-only views and exported files from ArchBoard, and understand what a link does and does not protect, with its size limits.

• Version History for Diagrams

  Use automatic snapshots, named checkpoints and safe restore in ArchBoard to experiment freely with a design and recover any earlier version of a diagram.