About Michael
I’m Michael Meierhoff, an independent software architect, systems thinker, and builder based in Hamburg, Germany.
My professional path started close to real systems: electronics, engineering, and software that had to work outside a slide deck. Over more than two decades I moved through software engineering, technical leadership, software architecture, and enterprise architecture. The common thread has always been the same: making complex systems understandable enough that people can make better decisions together.
Why visual work matters to me
Architecture is rarely created by one person writing down a perfect answer. It emerges through questions, sketches, disagreements, constraints, and a shared model that becomes clearer over time.
Diagrams are often where that understanding first becomes visible. Yet the artifact regularly loses its connection to the work it explains. It ends up in a separate SaaS workspace, an exported image, a presentation, or an undocumented link. The code continues to evolve while the visual context quietly becomes stale.
Sketchblock began with a simple question:
What if a team could collaborate on an Excalidraw board while the artifact remained an ordinary, versioned file beside the project?
The idea behind Sketchblock
Sketchblock brings three qualities together:
- the freedom of a visual canvas,
- the immediacy of live collaboration,
- the ownership and history of Git.
It is intentionally self-hosted and open source. Teams should be able to understand where their boards live, how collaboration works, and what happens when a result is saved.
The project also reflects how I like to build software: start with a real problem, keep the architecture inspectable, make the operating model explicit, and create something small enough to understand yet useful enough to put into practice.
Beyond Sketchblock
My broader work explores software architecture, systems thinking, visual knowledge, AI-assisted workflows, and tools that help people navigate complexity without hiding it. Two projects make that direction especially tangible: Method Atlas turns methods into practical guidance for structured work, while GraphRAG Compass creates an accessible map and learning path for graph-based knowledge systems.
For Sketchblock questions, contributions, or security coordination, contact sketchblock@meierhoff-systems.de.