jml's notebook

Published

2019-06-11

I find myself wanting to visualise a DAG.

I have quite a few concurrent projects at work. Many of these relate to each other, but many stand alone. Some dependencies are hard, but most are soft. Completing project X will make project Y easier. Project Z can be taken almost to completion but not actually finished until Project A gets signed off.

"Normally", I'd put all these on a whiteboard and muck around until I was satisfied. Unfortunately:

• I don't have a whiteboard near my desk
• Meeting rooms are very difficult to come by
• Some of the projects I'm working on are confidential

I think I'll get a few sheets of A3 paper and muck around at my desk, perhaps with some Post-It notes.

However, if that doesn't work, I'd like to use graphviz. Writing DOT files is easy, even if the output isn't visually appealing.

I am perplexed as to why DOT files aren't more semantic. I'd like to write:

digraph G {

  A [class = "management data-eng"];
  B [class = "data-eng hiring in-progress"];

  A -> B [class = "soft"];
}

That is, I'd like to specify classes for nodes and edges, much as one does with HTML, and then to have a separate stylesheet to decide what each one looks like.

I don't want to do this so I can outsource to a graphic designer (although that would be nice), I want this so I don't have to make decisions about visuals when I am really trying to make decisions about project structure.

I barely restrained myself from attempting such a thing this morning. If anyone knows of something like this that already exists, please let me know.