[raldi]

I'm a Google SRE, and the first place I go when faced with a complicated problem is the whiteboard (if collaborating with others) or the legal pad (if I'm trying to figure it out myself).

If collaborating with others in a remote office, I begrudgingly make a Google doc and treat it like a whiteboard.

Most of what we do involves enormously complicated systems with lots of nodes and RPC flows between those nodes, different pathways depending on the flavor of the RPC, systems spread out in different metros around the world... it's very difficult to visualize all that complexity in your head if you've never seen it on a cocktail napkin.

For example, just last week I sketched out a diagram inspired by the famous visualization of Napoleon's campaign to Moscow (http://www.aviz.fr/wiki/uploads/Research/minard.jpg), primarily to help me wrap my head around a complicated RPC flow (at the first node, 32% of the RPCs are classified as XYZ. Each of those spawns 3 new RPCs that go here and 1 that goes over there...) When I got stuck, I called over a colleague, and he was able to immediately see, just by looking, where I was going wrong, and with a few strokes of the marker, set me straight.

I later turned it into a spreadsheet so I could use it to explain the model to others. Also, it was nice to be able to use worksheet functions to do the math. But I never would have been able to get that far that fast without starting at the whiteboard.