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CSS must be the hardest technology out there, because people write these algorithms yet their site breaks completely on iOS safari on an iPhone SE2. Reminded me of when Linear’s CEO shared a post on Twitter bragging about how they only hired the best devs, and then I sent a screenshot of their homepage with a broken horizontal scroll. They dismissed it as a fault on my end for having an unsupported device. Turns out that a single CSS2 directive from 1998 fixed the issue (my OS is from 2022).

The first few graphs are impressive, it does a much tidier job. The Go queue one is objectively worse - the other versions keep services and users grouped together, as well as a left-to-right flow. The TALA version makes it look more complicated than it is.

That's nice; my first impressions of D2 were much worse than they should have been since the default layout engine is pretty terrible for some types of graphs; ELK is a big improvement, and when I tried TALA it was sometimes a big improvement over ELK.

I never purchased TALA though because I don't use D2 at work, and the costs of buying TALA were above my "fun money" amount.

Thanks for that. What do you think are the key heuristics / concepts that made it standout or be more appropriate for architecture diagrams?

Would integrating/implementing this into graphviz be a good move or mixing wrong things?

Always happy to see D2 on here! In my last job, I had to do several architecture diagrams. Learning D2 took maybe 1 day, and saved me much more time than that.

I'm so happy about this, we desperately need better auto layout. I'll be adding it to Daedalus

before discovering d2, I wrote / vibe coded my own diagram generator: https://azriel.im/disposition

then after discovering it, I was too invested in my own project to switch -- the complexity in positioning nodes, routing edges to not draw over labels, taking into account nesting and rank dir gave me an appreciation for how hard these can be, and I kinda wanted my own version (plus other features)

I just started diagramming with d2- I'll have to try this one out!

Related:

D2 Is Non-Profit

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589768

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