Multiplayer Sketches: Visually Convey your Ideas, Designs, and Plans

Whiteboarding Tools in System Design

Whiteboarding tools are indispensable in system design for visually conveying concepts, ideas, and rough plans. They tap into our natural preference for visual learning—most people, after all, agree that "a picture is worth a thousand words." However, most lack context, interactivity and are difficult to edit.

That’s precisely why we developed a feature called Sketches. It enables engineering teams to quickly sketch out an idea and share it with team members in real time. Users can react, ask questions or refine the sketch, collaborating with other team members.

Building on Multiplayer's auto-documentation feature, which ensures your system architecture diagrams are always correct and up-to-date, Sketches helps teams get visual alignment on concepts, helping to prevent misunderstandings and streamline project development.

Multiplayer Sketches Revamped

We're excited to announce a significant upgrade to our Sketches feature with a migration to the popular, beautifully designed open-source project, Excalidraw.

This migration has brought several enhancements:

✓ Improved Performance: Sketches can now handle complex drawings with multiple elements more efficiently, enhancing the user experience during intricate design sessions.

✓ Enhanced Stability and Robustness: Our sketching capabilities are now more stable and robust, setting the stage for future upgrades and features.

✓ Transparent SaaS Licensing: The move to an open-source platform aligns with our commitment to transparency and flexibility in software usage.

Additionally, we've relocated Sketches to a dedicated section in our navigation bar, making it more accessible and distinct from Notebooks, where it was previously housed.

This new placement reflects the importance and standalone nature of the Sketches functionality within the platform.

As a side note, any Sketches created with the previous version of the product will remain unaffected and are still accessible.

Examples of Multiplayer Sketches

Here’s how the team at Multiplayer uses the Sketches feature to enhance our system design processes:

(1) Visual Support for Design Decision Records

We created a visual diagram to depict the workflow of our real-time versioning process, which made the technical documentation in Notebooks easier to understand and more engaging.

(2) Clarifying Complex Concepts in Meetings

During a stand-up, our CTO used Sketches to discuss the CAP theorem’s implications on system design. This sketch illustrated why achieving both availability and consistency simultaneously is unrealistic in a non-ideal network, emphasizing the necessity of partition tolerance.

(3) Brainstorming Rough System Designs

In a session aimed at exploring different architectural patterns, Sketches served as a dynamic tool to visually draft and discuss potential designs. This allowed for immediate visual feedback and facilitated a more productive debate on the pros and cons of each architectural approach.

What's Next

With the successful release of our System Auto-Documentation (Radar) feature it became clear just how much developers value automated solutions that cut down on manual work.

This realization also highlighted a major pain point many teams face: the inefficiency of gathering the right information to effectively debug complex platform issues. That’s why our next focus is:

• Platform Debugger: A tool that lets you share deep session replays that include relevant data from frontend screens to deep platform traces, metrics and log. It helps your team pinpoint and resolve bugs faster by providing a complete picture of whats happening in your backend system architecture. No more wasted hours combing through APM data; the Multiplayer Platform Debugger gives you only the precise information you need to find and fix bugs quickly.
• Flow Diagrams: Visualize sequence diagrams with detailed dependency information at the component and API level for an easy understanding of low-level relationships.

If this is something that interests you, shoot us an email or let us know on Discord! 💜

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You can try Multiplayer now, explore its features, and let us know how we can improve it to better serve your needs.