Show HN: Blotato – Declarative Architecture Diagrams

Re:Show HN: Blotato – Declarative Architecture Diagrams by zen_lava on Monday June 21, 2021 @05:11PM (#27584561)

Hi there - I built Blotato to simplify creating and maintaining complex architecture diagrams, by combining declarative diagrams and automatic layout algorithms. I've spent hundreds of hours creating and painfully updating diagrams in LucidCharts and other tools. And I always found it painful (1) there's no other option besides drag-and-drop (2) which makes updating them tedious, re-arranging lots of boxes and arrows. This is a rough initial version and I appreciate any feedback!

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Re:Show HN: Blotato – Declarative Architecture Diagrams by troelsSteegin on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @06:30AM (#27589947)

On Windows/Chrome, the left panel holding the diagram specification renders at about 150px wide, so it's really hard to read.

Bigger picture, I think declarative diagrams are great. I do think beyond the challenge in getting a specification for a diagram to line up with a specification of a system in some domain, there's the challenge to support many flavors of system specification over a common diagramming substrate, and that that will be an important problem for you to solve.

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Re:Show HN: Blotato – Declarative Architecture Diagrams by zen_lava on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @10:20AM (#27591955)

Thanks for the feedback, I'll update the left panel.

In future versions, I'm thinking of creating templates for different types of system specs, where each template applies a different set of autolayout algorithms.

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