Show HN: OneModel – Diagramming tailor-made for Software Engineers

In previous jobs, I’ve had to draw many diagrams, whether to accompany design specifications or to explain something to peers. I’ve always felt drawing diagrams was too time consuming even though it was incredibly beneficial to my peers. That led me to creating a diagramming tool that allows software engineers to create diagrams quickly while remaining neat and presentable.

A few notable features:

- When drawing arrows, the tool automatically routes the arrows for you (using A* pathfinding and a nudging algorithm [1]).

- The tool has a wide variety of icons to choose from and I’m adding more. The goal here is to add all the icons a software engineer might need.

- Everything is placed on a grid with placement rules so the user doesn't have to worry about alignment.

- Embedding live (auto-updating) diagrams in Notion or using IFrames. GitHub support coming soon.

I understand the tool doesn’t support all use cases, I was primarily focused on architecture diagrams. I hope to support more types of diagrams (sequence, db schemas, flow charts, etc) in the future. Hopefully this is a good starting point to gauge feedback on the direction I’m heading towards.

OneModel is in beta and is completely free to use. It will remain free for individuals after the beta. I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback! I’ll be around to answer any questions.

If you’d like to reach out to me, feel free to email me at khaled[at]onemodel.app

[1] If you’re interested in these types of algorithms, this paper is great: https://users.monash.edu/~mwybrow/papers/wybrow-gd-2009.pdf

Personally, I'm a huge draw.io fan, and I use the desktop app for many things. While draw.io is great for many types of diagrams it's certainly perfect at none of them. At the end of the day I find myself creating boxes of the same size, formatting lines to be the same style, and routing arrows all around the place.

That's what I love about OneModel: it's currently built as a tool to design system diagrams. I don't have to muck around with box sizes, OneModel knows that a box is a service. I don't have to muck around with line widths and arrow styles, OneModel knows that an arrow represents a service relationship. I don't need to route arrows, OneModel knows that an arrow shouldn't overlap a service icon.

I'm really looking forward to some of the obvious places this tool can go. Attach metadata to a service that points to a GitHub repo and get deployment status. Attach metadata to a line to specify protocol, jump to a firewall rule, or consume Prometheus metrics. Maybe we'll even be able to export a diagram as a Terraform script one day!