Sometimes, during a train journey, you do crosswords or read a book, other times you open your laptop and start writing code, thinking about solving problems. Problems that, in this case, are part of the Service Management area in which I have been passionately working for a long time, specifically a way to visualize dependencies in the ocean of services I oversee.
There are obviously many solutions (free and paid), whose adoption is often hindered by cost or integration difficulties with the large suites of applications already adopted in the company, but I needed a simple excuse to have the opportunity to play with AI while doing a small exercise, leveraging widely used JavaScript libraries and publishing an application on a GitHub page.
The last time I used AI for programming was about two years ago, so it was a pleasant shock to recognize how extremely powerful this tool is today for kickstarting a project from scratch, starting with simple requirements and then quickly finding yourself with everything set up and ready to focus on the more ‘fun’ part. A consistent portion of the core logic was implemented during the two-hour train journey (with a shaky connection), and I spent some other iterations at home refining everything and fixing the last weird bugs (AI stopped being helpful after the kickstart momentum) while playing with my son, who is passionate about Domino and Kapla.
He greatly appreciated the colorful graphics and the animation of the visualized services, and given that Kapla is a trademark, I decided to name it Domino Dependency Mapping Visualization Tool! 🙂
Software engineering has never been so fun!
This application visualizes a service dependency map using the D3.js library. Users can upload a CSV file containing information about services and their dependencies, and view an interactive map that shows the relationships between services. If you’re curious about the final result, here are some references:
🔗https://francesconicolosi.github.io/domino-service-dependency-map/ (try it out)
🔗https://github.com/francesconicolosi/domino-service-dependency-map (github repo)
