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Show HN: Fast, Easy System Diagrams

architype.io

59 pointsflamingcow11 comments

I spend lots of my time at a whiteboard diagramming current or proposed systems. The whiteboard experience is less than ideal: my handwriting isn't great, folks on the other side of a VC can't see, etc. Most diagramming software is designed for careful human placement to get precise results. I built Architype to let me take notes and play with system designs in real time during a conversation, in a way that can be easily projected. It's designed to be entirely client-side and fast, but still powerful enough to produce useful diagrams for most purposes.

https://tomassetti.me/recognizing-hand-written-shapes-progra...

https://azure.microsoft.com/fr-fr/blog/turn-your-whiteboard-...

https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/11/15263434/google-ai-autodr...

https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/#

Really cool stuff! I'm glad I didn't miss it. The keybindings really make prototyping much faster, especially for keyboard-centric devs out there.

This is neat though I don't seem to be able to link more than 2 nodes together.

Thanks for this and filing the github issue as well. I put together a tutorial to walk through usage in more detail: https://github.com/firestuff/architype/blob/master/TUTORIAL....

In the linked example for the tutorial, I see there is a "gRPC" label for the links inside the two region groups, however, I am not seeing that label show up anywhere on the diagram. Is that expected behavior?

Other than that, very promising project and the vi keybindings are a nice touch.

Bug fixed early today -- you may have a cached copy. Try shift-reload.

Suggestion: it would be very useful to see some examples.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'd previously added the tutorial linked below, but that clearly wasn't cutting it, so I've now added an example diagram for first-time visitors. If you already visited, click on the top object (probably the help text), press shift-D to delete all items, then refresh the page.

mscgen + graphviz

or plantUML: http://plantuml.com/en/sequence-diagram

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