Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Create diagrams of complex data flows in software systems

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 67 posts

Re: Show HN: Create diagrams of complex data flows in software systems

#41

Post by jiehong »

myrmidon wrote: post #29

This is pretty nice! Really like the choices for the Keyboard shortcuts and how they are presented. My favorite tool for creating diagrams so far is still Drakon (try in browser: https://drakonhub.com/start-drakon ). It has the best "move element" behavior of any diagramming tool I've ever encountered (it shifts neighboring elements predictably , minimally and often in the exact way that I actually want). gg-charts i…

That's pretty nice that we can now do that in a browser!

I was also surprised diagrams are exportable to json. Yet, it does contain (x, y) coordinates, making that json impossible to write by hand.

If drakon had a a more human friendly and git friendly format (at least json is more git friendly), I'd gladly use it much more often!

Re: Show HN: Create diagrams of complex data flows in software systems

#42

Post by Veuxdo »

zokier wrote: post #39
Veuxdo wrote: post #35

Congrats on the launch. Looks very clean. I think the core concept is flawed, though. "Animated diagrams" are great for generating engagement on social media, but in practice an animated line doesn't tell you anything an arrow wouldn't. They just become a distraction. Plus, they make it harder to read a label on the line (and "real" diagrams should have those).

The animations turn these diagrams into hybrid between basic box-and-arrows diagrams and sequence diagrams, because the animations capture the temporal relationship between actions. They certainly can not be naively substituted with static arrows without loss of information.

As noted below, the right tool for that is a sequence diagram [0]. These can be static images and read at one's own pace.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_diagram

Re: Show HN: Create diagrams of complex data flows in software systems

#43

Post by j0d1 »

ilt wrote: post #10

Thanks for this! I love how minimal and intuitive it is. Feature request - ability to export to Animated PNG!

I'll create an issue to support exporting the animation in v1. Any particular reason for APNG vs GIF?

The animation in the README.md was captured with the MediaRecorder API. It produced a webm that I "cropped -> clipped -> to gif" manually. I am not that far to produce a looping webm that is perfectly cropped & clipped. I may release that first, and then tackle gif / apng / ??? later.

Re: Show HN: Create diagrams of complex data flows in software systems

#44

Post by h1fra »

beardedwizard wrote: post #12

I love it, but I can't help but wonder why I almost never see complete or up to date diagrams in an enterprise or at scale software engineering setting, despite there being so many tools in this space (mermaid, uml, draw.io, graphviz, etc). I wonder what the barrier is or how to make tools like this fundamentally different so that we would see more adoption. This comes up frequently in the context of secure design re…

I tried to solve this after years of frustration, but it's a complex task, especially that "complete" means there is a lot of noise in the diagrams. Plus the data gathering is an immense task, not everything is in the repo even with world class terraform, you have to connect to external sources.

https://github.com/specfy/specfy

Re: Show HN: Create diagrams of complex data flows in software systems

#45

Post by breck »

myrmidon wrote: post #29

This is pretty nice! Really like the choices for the Keyboard shortcuts and how they are presented. My favorite tool for creating diagrams so far is still Drakon (try in browser: https://drakonhub.com/start-drakon ). It has the best "move element" behavior of any diagramming tool I've ever encountered (it shifts neighboring elements predictably , minimally and often in the exact way that I actually want). gg-charts i…

> It has the best "move element" behavior of any diagramming tool I've ever encountered (it shifts neighboring elements predictably, minimally and often in the exact way that I actually want).

Thanks for calling attention to this. You are right. Drakon does that incredibly well!

Re: Show HN: Create diagrams of complex data flows in software systems

#46

Post by [deleted] »

Veuxdo wrote: post #35

Congrats on the launch. Looks very clean. I think the core concept is flawed, though. "Animated diagrams" are great for generating engagement on social media, but in practice an animated line doesn't tell you anything an arrow wouldn't. They just become a distraction. Plus, they make it harder to read a label on the line (and "real" diagrams should have those).

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Create diagrams of complex data flows in software systems

#47

Post by j0d1 »

Veuxdo wrote: post #35

Congrats on the launch. Looks very clean. I think the core concept is flawed, though. "Animated diagrams" are great for generating engagement on social media, but in practice an animated line doesn't tell you anything an arrow wouldn't. They just become a distraction. Plus, they make it harder to read a label on the line (and "real" diagrams should have those).

Someone submitted an issue on Github to add labels on links (i.e. lines) and I think it's a great idea for a v1. In my mind, the animations won't get in the way of reading the labels, but implementation will tell! I will also probably implement them like I implemented titles on systems, which is to avoid routing links over them.

> "Animated diagrams" are great for generating engagement on social media, but in practice an animated line doesn't tell you anything an arrow wouldn't.

Instead of showing a little green box moving from system A to system B, I could have shown static arrows alongside the link between system A to system B, or something similar.

I chose the moving green box as it represents the data flowing in the system, in a tangible / concrete manner.

It communicates:

- A data is created/produced/etc. at system A.

- The data is transferred/copied/moved/etc. to the system B.

- The data is received/consumed/etc. by the system B.

Re: Show HN: Create diagrams of complex data flows in software systems

#48

Post by j0d1 »

stopthe wrote: post #27

Wow, I'm glad that I visited HN when your tool was at the top. I'm going to use it to illustrate docs on our internal DAG-like system. By the way, is there a simple way to export the animated diagram as a GIF?

Thank you for your comment :)

I'm working on supporting webm first, as I am close to have a working feature using the MediaRecorder API of the browser. Exporting to gif will come after that, as it can be done by third-party tools as a workaround in the meantime (i.e. webm to gif).

Re: Show HN: Create diagrams of complex data flows in software systems

#49

Post by j0d1 »

piyushtechsavy wrote: post #21

I really liked the UI and the ease with which diagrams can be created.Will it be possible to import diagrams from other tools like draw.io here.

I think it is a great idea!

There is no plan yet to support importers directly in gg but the graphs produced with gg have a YAML/JSON representation under the hood so producing a "draw.io to gg" importer is feasible.

Post reply on HN