Aspies For Freedom

Does anyone here work with UML (Unified Modeling Language)?  At first glance, it looks like a bunch of flowcharts, but it's actually a detailed graphical language for describing systems.  Every little detail means something.  (e.g. The style of the arrowheads in the charts tells you whether it's synchronous or asynchronous.)  I remember it being mentioned a few times when I was in graduate school, but never had occasion to use it.

I've been reading a tutorial on it.  Realizing I'll need to practice with it to truly learn it, I downloaded a UML editor.  For the past few years, I've been using scripts I wrote in languages like Perl and Java as tools for my photography obsession.  I'm hoping the UML will finally give me a chance to turn that into a well-organized and efficient-to-use system.  Not only that, but it might be useful when I finally find something more lucrative to replace my current job.

Another thing... Since Aspies have a reputation for being natural systemizers, it seems only fitting to get fluent in a language of systems.  Then you'd have something to precisely describe whatever systems you devise.

Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone else here has had any dealings with UML.

Well yes, it was part of all part of my study of OOP (object oriented programming).
We use UML to design software, create class diagrams, interaction diagrams, sequence diagrams, etc. Good stuff.

UML is one of those things that personally I get annoyed by. Every time I see tons of UML I get flashbacks to 10 billion systems analysis lessons in high school, college and uni repeating the same things over and over......

I tend to describe software with a list of points. For example here's one i've been working on recently:
login process
1 - take username/password and auth with local DB
2 - parse URL into domain, grid and region
3 - look up any mappings from local credentials to foreign grid credentials for untrusted grids
4 - if trusted grid, sync account
5 - check remotegriddomain.com/metaverse.xml and try to grab the login URI
6 - if 404 or other problems, try local /metaverse.xml
7 - once login URI is got, proxy the login request

I'll also sometimes write a big bunch of rough module or class definitions.

For network architecture however, that's something different and I tend to do things like this:
http://www.litesim.com:8080/static/lites...essing.pdf

Quite simply, software is "a list of instructions" but networks are....... networks. Thus, networks lend themselves naturally to diagrams.