I built yet another carousel maker. Because “we added Redis” isn’t an engineering explanation.

iqbalcrat — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 17:33:12 +0000

Hey there,

I usually share tech and engineering content on LinkedIn, and I started experimenting with AI tools to turn articles into carousels.

The slides looked fine. But sometimes, the explanation didn’t survive.

An article would walk through a bottleneck, the approaches the team considered, and why they chose a particular solution. The carousel would turn that into a few disconnected takeaways.

You could read every slide and still wonder: okay, but how does this actually work?

Here’s a made-up example of what I mean.

Imagine an engineering article about adding a cache to an API. Reduce it too much, and you get:

Our API was slow.
We added Redis.
Now it’s faster.

That tells you what changed. But it leaves out most of what another developer could learn.

What was slow? Were the same queries being repeated? What happens on a cache miss? How stale can the data be? What happens when Redis is unavailable?

You don’t need to squeeze the entire article into seven slides. But you do need to preserve the reasoning behind the solution.

That was the problem I wanted to work on.

So, naturally, I built yet another carousel maker :-)

It’s called Chartin, and it turns engineering articles into visual carousels with diagrams and explanations made for developers.

The goal is to help someone follow the technical story:

What problem was the team facing?

How did the original system work?

What changed, and why?

What trade-offs came with that decision?

For the caching example, I’d want the slides to show the request path, where the cache fits, what happens on a miss, and the freshness trade-off. A diagram should help answer a question the reader has.

That’s the standard I’m trying to build Chartin around.

I shared it with a few friends who also post on LinkedIn, and they liked it. Now I’d like feedback from developers outside that circle.

If you have an engineering article you know well, you can try it here: Chartin

I’d especially like to hear where the output loses context or makes something harder to understand. That’s useful feedback for me.

What’s one technical detail you keep seeing simplified so much that it becomes misleading?

DEV Community: iqbalcrat

I built yet another carousel maker. Because “we added Redis” isn’t an engineering explanation.