Curious, what JS libs are you using for the drawing? Or is it a pure “from scratch” thing?
Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems
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Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems
#52Curious, what JS libs are you using for the drawing? Or is it a pure “from scratch” thing?
I'm using this low level SVG library:
https://svgjs.com/docs/3.0/
Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
That’s my point; it’s clearly not an easy problem to solve, but it has inherent value over other diagramming tools if you can solve it.
Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems
#54Hi 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 think we already have this tool, it's just not a gui but any programming language. I'll quite often create a debug tool to dump out graphviz of something difficult to understand e.g. project structures, syntax trees, call-graphs, components of 3d models etc. It only takes minutes.
The problem I experience is that the gap between raw data and an elegant diagram is really quite large. You mention layout problems. Hairballs and insane wiring is bad (and sometimes unsolvable without abstracting detail) but something even harder is that layout has strong semantic meanings, not too far from the order of words in a sentence. Even a small neat diagram can be really confusing or even misleading e.g. closely conceptually related things get spatially separated, the most important things get tucked into a corner, utter trivia looks like the main flow etc. Layout is a subtle language all of it's own.
In practice I find it requires one-off programs to inject case specific guidance to produce tolerable results e.g. styling certain things, grouping others, complex rules on what to ignore etc. You could wrap up some of these in a gui but it's so computational that it would be a retrograde step.
Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems
#55The thing I’ve been wanting is to have a diagramming tool that can serve as a live health dashboard with links to logs.
Infrastructure diagrams always get out of date, unless they’re looked at frequently. By hooking the diagrams with live status and logs, it becomes a tool that’s used daily. It would make logs easier to navigate and diagrams kept up to date.
Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems
#56“ create Scenario's for your diagram. Each Scenario is meant to capture a different set of conditions, and is composed of multiple Frame's”
Friendly suggestion: Fix these spelling errors.
Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems
#57Any thoughts on support for textual representation of the diagrams?
You might be interested in Svgbob https://github.com/ivanceras/svgbob and AsciiGrid: https://mbarkhau.keybase.pub/asciigrid/
Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems
#58Can I nitpick two things about the website? I don't mean to be an asshole about it or anything, I just hope it can help in some way:
- I think the mobile detection thing uses nothing but window size to determine if this is on a mobile browser or a desktop, so it mistakes my (definitely desktop) browser window for a mobile one. I know from my friends who do frontend stuff that reliably detecting a mobile browser isn't very straightforward (or even possible?) but perhaps a "my device was not correctly detected, request desktop site" button would help? Or at least a hint about resizing the browser window for technical users who are, nonetheless, not very web-inclined?
- The plural of "scenario" is "scenarios", without an apostrophe. Also frames, not frame's. Sorry if it seems overly pedantic but I see a lot of people (including native speakers) do this and it's driving me nuts.
Other than that I think like the idea! Me and web interfaces don't really get along so I can't say I've done too much test driving but I realize that's a personal preference of mine, and quite possibly something that puts me outside your target audience. I don't suppose there's yet a good web equivalent of Visio, and I'm fairly sure that the ones I've tried don't have the hierarchical/structured approach to diagramming that Terrastruct has. Best of luck with it -- I hope ten years from now I can tell my friends I went all grammar nazi on alixanderwang, world-renowned billionaire and the founder of Terrastruct!
Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems
#59Hi 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've used https://structurizr.com for that purpose before. It allows you to define the elements (containers, users, etc.) separately from the diagrams and then pull them into various views of the system.
My workflow is something like this:
- define the elements at various zoom levels https://structurizr.com/share/1/explore/tree
- define the relations https://structurizr.com/share/1/explore/component-dependenci...
- create diagrams by selecting subsets of what was defined in the first two steps https://structurizr.com/share/36141/diagrams#SystemLandscape
Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems
#60The thing I’ve been wanting is to have a diagramming tool that can serve as a live health dashboard with links to logs. Infrastructure diagrams always get out of date, unless they’re looked at frequently. By hooking the diagrams with live status and logs, it becomes a tool that’s used daily. It would make logs easier to navigate and diagrams kept up to date.
If you use Kubernetes you might find ArgoCD and Weave Scope interesting, both _sort of_ do this