The foundation is flowcharts, with support for individual layers distinguishing levels of abstraction, and scenarios for exploring use-cases. From there:
- Live data. We look at metrics on dashboards but it doesn't put into perspective how they relate to each other. Imagine seeing on your flowchart of servers, that one worker has an anomalous CPU reading, and you can click into that to see the individual readings of the running services on it. (rudimentary version: https://app.terrastruct.com/diagrams/1404897320)
- Automatic generation and sync of diagrams. Having access to sources like AWS account and version control to create and keep in sync diagrams of your infra, db schemas, UML classes, etc.
- Collaborative editing, seamless integrations with written documentation, linking directly to code where appropriate, version control, etc.
So much of software can be better understood visually. Still early on, if you're interested in learning more, https://terrastruct.com. And would love to chat (email in profile) with anyone with ideas.
Every time I share this, someone shares some tool I haven't heard of, and I've researched and tried a lot. It lines up with my experience working at software companies where every 3 weeks or so there's a thread asking for diagramming tool recommendation, and every time it's dozens of mixed responses of "I've used X but caveat A,B,C".
This has a lot of potential, usually enjoy flow charting things on draw.io. One thing though, the export to PPT is a big feature because most people will present through that but it is losing the navigation between each frame.
Also I suggest to not only market to Software engineers but people who work with data like drop-shippers, digital marketing agency, etc.
It loses the on-demand navigation, but my reasoning for deciding to support PPT is that when you're presenting, you'd want to present it sequentially anyway, instead of jumping around. The PDF versions are linked nicely, as an alternative.
I actually started this marketing it as "diagramming tool for systems". Talk about trying to be as generic as possible. I want to focus on one segment first, but totally, a side effect is that flowcharts enriched with data acting as a dashboard would be really beneficial to non-technical people to understand e.g. analytics funnel.
Fair enough, I missed out the scenarios when I first try it since I just click on the link to download the PPT. It make sense now when I use it side by side with what I have created.
Interactive flow charts should be the main selling point, as for usage, it is up to the user.
Also the pricing model, restriction on frames and layers would chase free individual away but they are those who plays a main roles in making something mainstream. I would recommend removing the usage restriction but adding collaborative restriction. A good example for this is how Google Sheet works.
Good luck, hoping to see it being used everywhere someday.
The foundation is flowcharts, with support for individual layers distinguishing levels of abstraction, and scenarios for exploring use-cases. From there:
- Live data. We look at metrics on dashboards but it doesn't put into perspective how they relate to each other. Imagine seeing on your flowchart of servers, that one worker has an anomalous CPU reading, and you can click into that to see the individual readings of the running services on it. (rudimentary version: https://app.terrastruct.com/diagrams/1404897320)
- Automatic generation and sync of diagrams. Having access to sources like AWS account and version control to create and keep in sync diagrams of your infra, db schemas, UML classes, etc.
- Collaborative editing, seamless integrations with written documentation, linking directly to code where appropriate, version control, etc.
So much of software can be better understood visually. Still early on, if you're interested in learning more, https://terrastruct.com. And would love to chat (email in profile) with anyone with ideas.