How to generate diagrams from text

This talk explains how you take a textual description of a system, like "x -> y", and turns it into a visual diagram, like one you might draw on a whiteboard. The ideas are from D2, an open-source programming language I co-authored.

A lot of the software we depend on feels like magic, like React, a browser, our OS. If you look at their source code, they're like a million files with 20 levels of indirection to get to the initialization. At the core of these unapproachable codebases though is some simple concepts that you can implement yourself in a weekend. So the goal of this talk is to demystify a process that feels like magic by explaining software in simple terms without relying on dependencies or academic jargon.