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0 pointsalixanderwang5y ago0 comments

Document software design 10x better.

The foundation is flowcharts, with support for individual layers distinguishing levels of abstraction, and scenarios for exploring use-cases. From there:

- Live data. We look at metrics on dashboards but it doesn't put into perspective how they relate to each other. Imagine seeing on your flowchart of servers, that one worker has an anomalous CPU reading, and you can click into that to see the individual readings of the running services on it. (rudimentary version: https://app.terrastruct.com/diagrams/1404897320)

- Automatic generation and sync of diagrams. Having access to sources like AWS account and version control to create and keep in sync diagrams of your infra, db schemas, UML classes, etc.

- Collaborative editing, seamless integrations with written documentation, linking directly to code where appropriate, version control, etc.

So much of software can be better understood visually. Still early on, if you're interested in learning more, https://terrastruct.com. And would love to chat (email in profile) with anyone with ideas.

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5 comments · 3 top-level

wbeckler5y ago· 1 in thread

Have you ever used Labview? It started out great but hasn't evolved well and can't handle complex stuff.

It's still used in lab environments.

alixanderwangOP5y ago

Every time I share this, someone shares some tool I haven't heard of, and I've researched and tried a lot. It lines up with my experience working at software companies where every 3 weeks or so there's a thread asking for diagramming tool recommendation, and every time it's dozens of mixed responses of "I've used X but caveat A,B,C".

Thanks for sharing! I'll check it out.

damowangcy5y ago· 1 in thread

This has a lot of potential, usually enjoy flow charting things on draw.io. One thing though, the export to PPT is a big feature because most people will present through that but it is losing the navigation between each frame.

Also I suggest to not only market to Software engineers but people who work with data like drop-shippers, digital marketing agency, etc.

alixanderwangOP5y ago

It loses the on-demand navigation, but my reasoning for deciding to support PPT is that when you're presenting, you'd want to present it sequentially anyway, instead of jumping around. The PDF versions are linked nicely, as an alternative.

I actually started this marketing it as "diagramming tool for systems". Talk about trying to be as generic as possible. I want to focus on one segment first, but totally, a side effect is that flowcharts enriched with data acting as a dashboard would be really beneficial to non-technical people to understand e.g. analytics funnel.

Thanks for the suggestion!

1 more reply

sdinsn5y ago

Sounds like a good idea.

(And just FYI, the pricing section isn't rendering properly on Firefox 77)

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