Clear documentation is an important step to encouraging contributions to your open source project. For the visual learners, a diagram can be worth a thousand words. Mermaid is an open source library for generating diagrams from human-readable markdown-style text that can be easily maintained and updated.

In this hands-on demonstration, I will discuss potential benefits of diagrams in your documentation, introduce Mermaid, and code a few example diagrams. Attendees of this demonstration should expect to learn basic Mermaid syntax and usage to add visual diagrams to their markdown documentation and how to find resources for further learning.