If that works for you, that’s of course perfect. I find that the study of CT pretty has very much clarified that a lot of diagrams I see in other domains (business processes, supply chain modelling) directly relate to my understand of diagrams.
I think it is a property of human cognition that if we draw an arrow from a to b, and one from b to c, that there is some kind of relation between a to c as well.
What this means concretely is that if I can draw my problem, in my domain, as a diagram with boxes and arrows, there is a reasonable chance that you can actually understand it, and actually contribute to it. Similarly, seeing diagrams from your problem domain is often sometimes I can relate to my design patterns and software architecture foundations, and I might be able to ask quite pointed questions when trying to say, build a mathematical model or build some supply chain software. Questions like “ok, but, is there an arrow from here to here?” and the answer “oh yes, that happens when we actually replenish the inventory by doing X, I forgot about that part”.
Another thing I found people do with CT is that they use it as a toolbox of abstractions that they can try to fit to a problem. Say, “oh, is there maybe a functor from petri nets to databases? ok, there is, but it’s kind of useless. Does this formulation actually work as a monad?” This is useful for finding elegant APIs to problems, say things like optics (lenses, etc…).
