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Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems

terrastruct.com

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Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems

#21

I like it, but just browsing the site quickly I’m not seeing something I’ve grown accustom to: sequence diagrams. My auth system for an embedded product to hit AWS is three players and fairly complex to explain. Makes sense to me as a sequence diagram, does anyone know if this option exists?

This is designed for sequences! You have to create a scenario (name of your sequence, eg “auth request”), and then you create frames for it. Frames are steps of a sequence. I used to use websequencediagrams.com for this btw, in case that fits your needs too!

Well then I really need to download this.

Yes, WSD is awesome.

Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems

#22

Hi HN, I made a diagramming tool specifically for explaining systems. It's something that I felt like I could've needed at my previous engineering jobs when I was explaining some software architecture or concept that were complex and I had trouble expressing on a single image diagram. Would love to hear HN's thoughts and feedback!

The UI iterations of this app over 2 years: https://twitter.com/alixanderwang/status/1212875949101875200

Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems

#23

Hi HN, I made a diagramming tool specifically for explaining systems. It's something that I felt like I could've needed at my previous engineering jobs when I was explaining some software architecture or concept that were complex and I had trouble expressing on a single image diagram. Would love to hear HN's thoughts and feedback!

Some educational content made with this tool:

An overview of modern Javascript tools https://app.terrastruct.com/diagrams/788622353

Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems

#24

Nice tool, I can see myself using it. I was intuitively clicking on the boxes expecting to go to the details of that component. It would be nice to move deeper into sub-layers dynamically, instead of relying on the side tree menu.

Yeah I thought about this as well and is something I originally imagined as a cool feature.

The problem, though, is that not everyone will create a sub-layer for every component. It'd be a bad user experience for the viewer to have to just try clicking components to see which ones work, and I don't want to modify the look of the diagram, from what the author intended, to add some visual indicator that it's clickable.

Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems

#25

Hi HN, I made a diagramming tool specifically for explaining systems. It's something that I felt like I could've needed at my previous engineering jobs when I was explaining some software architecture or concept that were complex and I had trouble expressing on a single image diagram. Would love to hear HN's thoughts and feedback!

I've often needed something like this, but, sadly, once again, this isn't it.

No discredit to you; this is great work, but for me, personally: The world does not need more diagram editors.

Diagrams are fundamentally not the right tool for the problem I have.

The problem I have is that I have a technical system, for example, a network diagram, or an architecture diagram of a system or set of systems; and I need the data that represents that system, to be visualised in multiple diagrams, in such a way that you can have multiple views of the same data.

This means that when you make a change to the data, all of the diagrams are updated to reflect that change.

As an analogy to explain what I mean, consider a 3D model:

If you have a 3D model, you want to save it as a 3D model.

What you don't want, is to manually draw the way that model looks from 5 different perspectives; because if you alter the model, to say, add a new cube, or change the color of a face; you have to redraw every single diagram.

What would be actually novel, would be to allow you tag / label / whatever the components of your diagrams in some way, and they apply filters to the diagram to generate different views of the data, while maintaining one single master diagram.

I know, this is a hard problem, because layouts are fundamentally hard (if you've ever worked on layout engines you'll know exactly what I mean), and you end up looking like graphviz as soon as you try to use constraint solving to layout the elements in a diagram... I guess.

...but, at least it would be genuinely novel to try.

I don't really see much here that would, eg. get to use it over the many other indistinguishable diagram editors out there.

Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems

#26
I've been using MindNode for this.

I've found it very good at letting me quickly transfer my system ideas to paper. It gets out of the way and works with quick keystrokes.

But it breaks down when trying to use it for presentation. It is too difficult to show and hide different states of the system when presenting to others. It's slow changing between each state by showing and hiding different nodes.

I'm looking forward to trying your tool for this reason. I just wish it was a local program.

Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems

#27

Hi HN, I made a diagramming tool specifically for explaining systems. It's something that I felt like I could've needed at my previous engineering jobs when I was explaining some software architecture or concept that were complex and I had trouble expressing on a single image diagram. Would love to hear HN's thoughts and feedback!

I've often needed something like this, but, sadly, once again, this isn't it. No discredit to you; this is great work, but for me, personally: The world does not need more diagram editors. Diagrams are fundamentally not the right tool for the problem I have. The problem I have is that I have a technical system, for example, a network diagram, or an architecture diagram of a system or set of systems; and I need the da…

Do you mean something like Netflix Vizceral[1]? The problem with using data is that there's usually too much of it, and at that point you do end up with a graph that only something like graphviz can layout.

I know what you mean though; but it has to be IMO just enough data, that can then be tweaked by a human to help with the key purpose of such diagrams - human understanding.

1: https://github.com/Netflix/vizceral

Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems

#28

Hi HN, I made a diagramming tool specifically for explaining systems. It's something that I felt like I could've needed at my previous engineering jobs when I was explaining some software architecture or concept that were complex and I had trouble expressing on a single image diagram. Would love to hear HN's thoughts and feedback!

I've often needed something like this, but, sadly, once again, this isn't it. No discredit to you; this is great work, but for me, personally: The world does not need more diagram editors. Diagrams are fundamentally not the right tool for the problem I have. The problem I have is that I have a technical system, for example, a network diagram, or an architecture diagram of a system or set of systems; and I need the da…

I don't have any personal experience from it aside from viewing an existing architecture once, but from what I could tell, the ArchiMate language supports this, possibly via a concept called "viewpoints" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArchiMate#Viewpoints). There is a free and open-source tool for it: https://www.archimatetool.com/ .

Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems

#29

Nice tool, I can see myself using it. I was intuitively clicking on the boxes expecting to go to the details of that component. It would be nice to move deeper into sub-layers dynamically, instead of relying on the side tree menu.

Yeah I thought about this as well and is something I originally imagined as a cool feature. The problem, though, is that not everyone will create a sub-layer for every component. It'd be a bad user experience for the viewer to have to just try clicking components to see which ones work, and I don't want to modify the look of the diagram, from what the author intended, to add some visual indicator that it's clickable.

Please do reconsider adding a visual indicator. Direct manipulation is a powerful UI technique and helps retain user focus. It could be something as simple as the mouse pointer changing when hovering over a component that can be drilled down into.

Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems

#30
Kudos on the elegant execution of an interface to explain architecture and system behavior with layers and sequences!

Suggestions for v2: How to show v2 of system has changed since v1, and handling requests from your users to version control their diagrams. Nice problems to have!

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