In my experience if someone can't read UML and know how to write a decorator pattern something is up. Honestly, I've never used it in depth but for design patterns I expect people who are "seniors" to understand it. And I expect any expert to be able to look at UML and get the gist of it.
On a side note about design patterns, once as a junior I was at a digital agency and they were doing an in-house tech talk where one of the leads was giving an explaination and he was showing the singleton pattern but what they had allowed for two instances and when I tried to make it clearer to the intern that normally there is only one instance per singleton. The two leads were "Yea but it's still a valid singleton" - it was not but I wasn't point that out directly but continued to make it clear that most people would expect a single instance when talking about a Singleton.
Use cases, activity diagrams, deployment diagrams etc.
Yeah - 'informal' UML use a lot of people are happy with but some things like exactly what some of the features of activity diagrams mean is amazingly badly understood by a lot of people.
I'm ok with the 'UML as sketch' approach, but 'UML as blueprint' is a nightmare that I've never seen work:
Honestly, most of the time I use these diagrams just to give people the gist of what I'm talking about. And my diagrams are super low effort. Think low effort whiteboard diagrams during a meeting style.
> Yeah - 'informal' UML use a lot of people are happy with but some things like exactly what some of the features of activity diagrams mean is amazingly badly understood by a lot of people.
Same with frontend, I give a very rough wireframe trying to translate wtf they are telling me. The end result usually looks very different because once you flesh stuff out IRL there is always a bunch of hills to climb that were unanticipated. And that’s why it always takes 2-3x longer than we first thought.
Especially in a large application with lots of moving and breakable critical parts.
The only solution is constant feedback loops and not being bummed out when your code goes in the dustbin.
On a side note about design patterns, once as a junior I was at a digital agency and they were doing an in-house tech talk where one of the leads was giving an explaination and he was showing the singleton pattern but what they had allowed for two instances and when I tried to make it clearer to the intern that normally there is only one instance per singleton. The two leads were "Yea but it's still a valid singleton" - it was not but I wasn't point that out directly but continued to make it clear that most people would expect a single instance when talking about a Singleton.