DDS

Background

Professional AV documentation is a set of documents that all describe the same system: signal-flow schematics, cable schedules, rack layouts, bills of materials. In practice they are drawn and typed separately, so they drift apart, and every revision is a manual reconciliation exercise. I do this work professionally, and DDS is my answer to it.

The core idea is “one model, many views”: the system is stored once, as placed equipment blocks, connections, rooms, and racks, and every document is a deterministic derivation of that model.

What it does

• A canvas for placing equipment blocks and wiring them into a system
• Cable schedules, rack layouts, and bills of materials generated from the model, not drawn by hand
• Change one connection and every derived document updates with it

Status and limitations

• In active development; it is my most mature software project, but not yet a released product
• Currently a desktop app (Electron), single user, project files on disk
• Every change is gated by a test suite and type checking before it lands

What I learned

Schema design and migrations for a long-lived data model, deterministic derivation pipelines, and Electron main/renderer architecture in TypeScript. It is also where I developed a disciplined AI-assisted engineering workflow: agentic tools write much of the mechanical code, and the test suite is the safety net that keeps them honest.