penpot VS excalidraw

Imagine designers and coders working seamlessly together. That's what Penpot aims to do. It's a tool where designers can create stunning designs, interactive prototypes, and design systems at scale. Developers then have ready-to-use code, which makes their workflows faster and more efficient. Penpot's latest version receives a new grid CSS layout, new UI, new components system, and more components. Oh and there's now light AND dark mode 🎉.

This is how I see things also. Clojure is extremely practical and naturally attracts people that want to ship products.

The "Figma OSS Alternative" post that's also on the HN homepage right now doesn't mention Clojure anywhere (no comments about it either!), but Penpot is clearly also yet another app successfully shipped using Clojure: https://github.com/penpot/penpot

Really neat. I was mainly curious to know when they are planning to release the self hosted docker versions of Penpot 2.0. Looks like its coming in the next couple days hopefully [1].

[1]: https://github.com/penpot/penpot/issues/4380

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Penpot - Open Source Alternative to Figma

- Penpot (open source) - penpot.app/

A colleague had a quick presentation on Penpot[1] a few weeks back. Was a real contender I think.

[1]: https://penpot.app/

ExcaliDraw - https://excalidraw.com/

ExcaliDraw

However, Notion and Obsidian can only help you write documentation. Well, how about some visuals? Let's talk about Excalidraw.

Fun fact: I used GA in Excalidraw, and it's still powering some of the interactions! https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/blob/master/package...

I was happy to find out recently that there is a way to make Mermaid diagrams WYSIWYG / drag and drop editable that the open source https://excalidraw.com has and did I mention it's open source!? With a LLM, you can go full loop back to Mermaid again after a few rounds of manual editing. "What a time to be alive!"

I'm working on a personal project and found myself looking for an alternative to Postman/Insomnia this morning. This made me realize i've been using the same tools for so long for work (mobile development, finance) that this project may be a good time to try out some new things.

Here are a few tools that i've been using lately that I really enjoy:

https://pocketbase.io/ - A dead-simple self-hosted firebase/supabase-like "backend in a box" using golang and sqlite. So far i've been really impressed. I've gone the route of extending the base offering with more go code and am really enjoying the experience.

https://excalidraw.com/ - An open source whiteboarding tool. Slick to use and after learning some keybinds I've gotten pretty fast at throwing together diagrams to explain things to people on my team. The killer piece though is that the filetype is just json, so I can source control my diagrams. Even better, their "export to png" function has a box to embed the json data _into_ the png, allowing me to slap the diagram in places that only accept images (think confluence) and still be able to change the diagram later if needed. 10/10.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ - Gitlab's CI/CD toolset is really impressive, and I've gotten really intimate with it's deeper features over the past year. I'd be curious though to hear from someone who's familiar with it vs it's competitors.