built with coffee

TIL: graphvis

Jun 15, 2020

I worked for a number of years as a low-budget technical writer, producing documentation and technical diagrams at a few different companies. I say low-budget because these were manufacturing companies, not software companies, and the documentation was more “we need to keep this on file” than “we need this to function”. My go to tool for diagrams was Visio, and by the end of my stint as a technical writer I could do 3D diagrams in it that would put Autocad to shame, but lining up boxes for 2D diagrams was always a chore.

Fast forward many years, today I needed to draw a diagram for a new architecture, and I was going to default to pen and paper (or, iPad and Pencil) as I usually do, but I vaguely recalled there being an app out there that did sketchy-style diagrams. Some googling found it, but it didn't have a drag and drop GUI, it uses [graphvis](https://graphviz.org), which it turns out is the best thing ever. Why spend minutes moving arrows around when you can just `a -> b` it!

<div><a href='//sketchviz.com/@jjmartucci/89d18bc4f700e592667461623579df47'><img src='https://sketchviz.com/@jjmartucci/89d18bc4f700e592667461623579df47/5a61a8b15efcc3bb8933aa3b2fed04820baf07db.sketchy.png' style='max-width: 100%;'></a><br/><span style='font-size: 80%;color:#555;'>Hosted on <a href='//sketchviz.com/' style='color:#555;'>Sketchviz</a></span></div>

Posted: June 2020