2 products left, but today Brainboard

Hi friend 👋,

I continue to believe that an IDE and a design tool may coexist in the same tool. If we have that at some time, the final product will be much better. The unnoticed section where we move all knowledge from the design tool to the IDE generates numerous issues. I'm aware of all the design tokens and so on, but there's still a long way to go. The same issue arises on the infrastructure side. I am aware of the serverless hype and all infra as software tools, however there are still gaps. Meanwhile, it is always difficult to communicate what is going on with the infrastructure and what our dev-ops teams are doing.

Typically, I am the one on the opposite side of the table. When a client's engineering team has questions about our tools' scalability approach or software architecture diagram, I'm the one who answers them. Our engineering team sent me a diagram that details how our architecture's many components talk to one another, but I know that maintaining it will be challenging. Even if it's a pain to draw for the first time, updating this diagram seems completely unnecessary. Is it possible to design, implement and deploy the architecture visually?

Today, Brainboard is our product.

To facilitate visual and collaborative infrastructure design, Brainboard developed an abstraction layer prior to Terraform. Although software architecture is not my area of expertise, I find the topic endlessly fascinating. Unsurprisingly, they also developed an import mechanism to accommodate preexisting architectures in Brainboard. Although it has the appearance of a design tool, all of its components are actually Terraform modules. You can invite guests to your project to see what you've done. It's also a fantastic solution for the SaaS software architecture due diligence process.

I envision a software development operating system that combines research, task management, design, coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance into a single tool. I understand that everyone requires different things, but the end product requires all of them. And all of the frictions that occur between these processes have a substantial impact on the finished output. One of the tech behemoths, most likely Microsoft, will do this at some point. Let's see what happens.

We’ll talk again tomorrow.

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