Categories
Charts, Diagrams, and Infographics What I’m Up To

Whiteboarding

Joey’s hand-drawn diagram of how Packfiles’ Warp performs Azure DevOps-to-GitHub repository migrations

One of the (many) nice things about going to Embarc Collective to do my work at Packfiles for three (sometimes four) days a week is that they’ve got great whiteboards:

Joey’s laptop and insulated mug sitting on a table, with Embarc Collective’s tall whiteboards in the background.

As Packfiles’ documentarian and primary technical and customer support go-to person and as an occasional cartoonist, the whiteboards are both a great way to flesh out diagrams that I’ll later illustrate in Canva as well as to keep those doodling skills sharp.

Who knows, maybe I’ll just use hand-drawn whiteboard diagrams instead. What do you think?

Categories
Artificial Intelligence Charts, Diagrams, and Infographics Humor

AI instructions for wall-mounting a TV

The viewing angle might not be so great, but on the bright side, it’s really easy to reach the TV’s HDMI ports!

(Also: ChatGPT didn’t draw those images; its image-rendering counterpart DALL-E did.)

Categories
Charts, Diagrams, and Infographics What I’m Up To

My graphics from Unified.to’s “What is a unified API?” article

What is a unified API?

A unified API is an API that brings together multiple APIs and presents them as a single API service. With a unified API, developers can integrate their applications with multiple SaaS applications using a single, consistent interface.
Tap to read the original article.

Last week, I revised one of Unified.to’s earliest articles, An Overview of Unified APIs, rewriting it as What is a Unified API?

In addition to updating the text of the article, I also created some explainer graphics to liven it up and save the reader from being hit with just a wall of text. Those graphics are what you see in this article — enjoy!

Endpoints in a unified API

A unified API should have unified or common endpoints for specific categories  of integrations. Most API solutions don’t actually offer this.
Tap to read the original article.
Data models in a unified API

A unified API should unify data models from different APIs that represent the same thing
into a single data model with enough properties to satisfy most use cases.
Tap to read the original article.
Authorization in a unified API

A unified API should have a method for authorizing access to customer data that is easy to use. Ideally, it should provide an authorization component that can be embedded in applications.
Tap to read the original article.
Webhooks in a unified API

A unified API should abstract all of the complexities of handling those vendors that don’t support webhooks and provide a unified webhook experience.
Tap to read the original article.
Unified API breadth and depth

Breadth refers to the number of APIs supported by a unified API. Depth refers to the number of fields supported by a unified API’s data model.
Tap to read the original article.
Categories
Business Charts, Diagrams, and Infographics

Org Charts of the Big Tech Companies (Plus an Enhancement)

This set of satirical, funny-because-it’s-true org charts for big tech companies has been doing the internet rounds for the past couple of days. (The original version, by Emmanuel “Manu” Cornet, is here.) It shows the chain of command at Amazon, Google, Facebook, my former company Microsoft, Apple and Oracle.

Take a look:

Org charts tech companies

Here they are, a little bit larger:

This weekend, someone showed me the org charts and asked me how true-to-life the Microsoft org chart was. I told him “It’s a satire piece, and as such, they’re going to take some liberties with the truth for comic effect. I’d have drawn it like this…”

Microsoft org chart

I kid because I love.