Recent content on Leo Mata
We were adding passwordless sign-in to a client’s mobile and web app. Instead of a password, the user receives a sign-in link or a short code by email and enters it. It removes a stored credential and is usually fewer steps than a social login.
The approach depends on the email being delivered. The code has to reach the user’s actual mailbox. A send that the mail provider accepts…
I was sitting with a friend who runs engineering at a healthtech startup, big name, redacted. PHI on the line, audit obligations, the kind of company where a wrong move means a press release no one wants to write. He had been working through the AI tooling market for a few weeks, evaluating what was available against what his organization actually needed. Each option solved a piece. None gave him…
PR #7535 merged today. Mermaid now has a Cynefin framework diagram type, the first text-based DSL for Cynefin diagrams anywhere.
This post wraps up the series. Eight months, eight posts, two diagram implementations, one merged PR, and a lot of lessons about how open source actually works.
If you’re not familiar with the Cynefin framework, I wrote a full introduction earlier in this…
At the end of the last post, I said I was building Cynefin diagram support for Mermaid next. Before I get into the implementation, I want to talk about the framework itself, because it deserves a proper introduction.
How I Found Cynefin Years ago at the Wikimedia Foundation, my Director introduced me to the Cynefin framework. He used it to map and manage the complexity of the ecosystems we…
I spent the better part of three weekends building a complete Wardley Map diagram type for mermaid-js, the popular text-to-diagram library. It was thorough. It was modular. It was tested. And by the time I opened the PR, someone else had already merged theirs.
Here’s what happened, and why I’d do it all again.
Why Wardley Maps? If you’re not familiar, Wardley Maps are…
There is one metric that matters in software: did the idea ship as a live, running product?
Not a prototype. Not a demo. Not a repository with a promising README. A working system, deployed, used. Everything else is work in progress.
This sounds obvious. It isn’t. Most of the industry is optimizing for the wrong things — generating code faster, writing tests automatically, producing…
The Wardley Map PR is in draft, working through code review. Here’s what’s on the roadmap once the core implementation lands.
Immediate Priority: Regions The most requested Wardley Map feature. Regions let you group components into market segments, organizational boundaries, or areas of focus:
wardleyMap title Platform Strategy region 'Core Platform' [0.3, 0.4, 0.8, 0.9] region…
For those curious about the internals, here’s how a Mermaid diagram type comes together. This is the architecture I followed to build Wardley Map support.
The Stack Input (DSL) → Langium Grammar → Parser → AST → Database → Renderer → SVG Each layer has a specific job. Data flows one direction. No layer reaches back into a previous one. Let’s walk through them.
Layer 1: Grammar…
Time to actually build Wardley Map support for Mermaid. Here’s the journey from “I should do this” to a working PR.
Understanding the Codebase Mermaid is a mature project—70k+ stars, hundreds of contributors, years of history. Before writing code, I spent time understanding:
How existing diagram types are structured: Each diagram type lives in…
I could have built a standalone Wardley Map library. Or a VSCode extension. Or yet another web app.
I chose to contribute to Mermaid instead. Here’s why.
GitHub Native Mermaid is built into GitHub markdown rendering. Write a fenced code block with mermaid, and it just renders. No extensions. No build steps. No external services.
```mermaid flowchart LR A[Start] --> B[End] That's…
So I wanted Wardley Maps in my workflow. Native. Version-controlled. In markdown. Living alongside my code and documentation.
The options were… limited.
What Exists Today I spent a weekend evaluating every Wardley Map tool I could find:
OnlineWardleyMaps: The gold standard for web-based mapping. Great UI, good export options. But it’s a separate app—you create maps there,…
I’ve been using Wardley Maps to think through strategy for Calliope AI, and I’m convinced more people should know about this tool. It’s changed how I approach technical strategy, and I want to bring it to more engineers.
What is a Wardley Map? Created by Simon Wardley, it’s a visual way to map out your value chain and understand where things are headed. The map has two…
Cynefin diagrams now have a text-based DSL in Mermaid, for the first time!
A friend introduced me to the Cynefin framework as a tool to map and manage complexity. I’m in no way an expert, but the bits I’ve picked up have changed how I think about problems, and I became a big fan.
The Cynefin framework, created by Dave Snowden, is a conceptual sense-making model used to help…
Passwordless sign-in is only as reliable as your email delivery.
We’ve been adding email-based sign-in to a client’s app: a link or a code instead of a password. It is a good user experience, and it moves your login reliability onto one thing, email actually being delivered. If the message does not arrive, the user cannot get in.
For the major mailbox providers we can test…