For Data Engineers

For data engineers who design pipelines at the whiteboard.

BoardSnap is an iOS app that turns a whiteboard photo into a structured summary and action plan in ten seconds. For data engineers, that means pipeline architecture sessions, schema design discussions, and data flow diagrams produce written artifacts that survive into implementation — not just a photo in someone's Slack.

Download on the App Store Free to start. Pro from $9.99/mo or $69.99/yr.

What hurts today

  • Pipeline architecture sessions produce clear DAG designs on the board that get partially re-invented when someone finally sits down to implement in Airflow or dbt
  • Schema design discussions involve a lot of table relationships and normalization decisions that need to be documented before the first migration is written
  • Data lineage diagrams drawn in a session are the most important thing nobody ever documents — and without them, debugging a data quality issue takes three times as long
  • ETL flow discussions — what transforms what, in what order, with what dependencies — get reconstructed from memory when the pipeline is being built
  • SLA and data contract discussions with downstream consumers produce verbal agreements that aren't tracked anywhere
  • Cross-team data integration sessions where three different data owners are at the board produce three different understandings of what was agreed

How BoardSnap helps

  • Snap a pipeline architecture session and get a structured description of the DAG components, dependencies, and data flows — the first draft of your pipeline documentation
  • Schema design boards produce a written description of each table, its purpose, its relationships, and the design decisions that led there — source material for your migration comments
  • Data lineage diagrams produce a system-level description of data ownership, transformation steps, and downstream dependencies — the kind of lineage documentation that prevents three-hour debugging sessions
  • Data contract discussions produce a written SLA agreement — source schema, delivery frequency, quality guarantees — ready for both producer and consumer teams to sign off on
  • Brand-aware AI writes summaries using your team's actual tool names — your specific dbt models, your Airflow DAG naming, your warehouse's schema conventions
  • Cross-team integration boards produce a single shared written summary — no more three different teams leaving with three different understandings of the data contract

A day with BoardSnap

  1. Pipeline design

    Draw the DAG — sources, transforms, dependencies, outputs. Snap. BoardSnap produces a structured description of each pipeline stage, the data flow between stages, and the open engineering questions — the first draft of your pipeline spec.

  2. Schema design

    Draw tables, relationships, indexes, and partitioning strategy. Snap. The summary describes each entity, its attributes, and the design rationale — source material for migration files and schema documentation.

  3. Data lineage session

    Map where the data comes from, what transforms it, and where it goes. Snap. BoardSnap produces a lineage summary — source, transformation steps, and downstream consumers — the documentation that saves hours when something breaks.

  4. Data contract discussion

    Agree on schema, delivery SLA, and quality guarantees with a downstream consumer team. Snap. The summary becomes the draft data contract — fields, types, freshness guarantees, and escalation path.

  5. Incident root cause

    Sketch the data quality failure — which table, which upstream, what the anomaly looks like. Snap. BoardSnap produces a structured incident summary with a prioritized fix list — the post-mortem before you've even started writing it.

Features that matter for data engineers

Flow diagram reading

BoardSnap AI reads DAG-style pipeline diagrams, dependency arrows, and data flow maps. It produces a structured written description of the pipeline architecture — components, dependencies, and data movement — not just a list of node labels.

Brand-aware AI

Paste your data team's wiki, your dbt project docs, or your warehouse schema reference. BoardSnap AI learns your table names, your pipeline naming conventions, and your data team's vocabulary — summaries reference your actual data assets.

Pinned context

Pin your data catalog overview, your current data architecture doc, or your team's data principles. Every future board chat already knows your stack and your standards.

Projects per domain

Keep marketing data pipeline work separate from finance reporting and product analytics. Each project has isolated board history and technical context.

Offline queue

Data engineering work happens in all kinds of environments — including data centers and conference rooms with spotty signal. BoardSnap queues captures on-device and syncs when online.

Frequently asked

Can BoardSnap read a complex DAG diagram with multiple branches and dependencies?

Yes. BoardSnap AI reads DAG-style diagrams — nodes, directional arrows, parallel branches, and dependency annotations. It produces a structured written description of the pipeline components and their execution dependencies.

How does it handle schema design sessions with ERD-style diagrams?

BoardSnap AI reads entity-relationship style diagrams — table boxes, foreign key arrows, cardinality notation, and column lists. It produces a written description of each table and the relationships between them.

Is it useful for data contract documentation?

Yes — snap the board at the end of a producer-consumer data contract discussion. BoardSnap produces a structured summary of the agreed schema, delivery frequency, quality guarantees, and open questions — the draft contract both teams can review.

Can I use it for documenting data lineage?

Yes. Draw your data lineage on the board — sources, transformations, outputs, downstream consumers. Snap. BoardSnap produces a lineage summary that serves as the first draft of your lineage documentation — the kind of artifact that makes debugging data quality issues dramatically faster.

What about cross-team integration sessions with multiple data owners?

Snap the board at the end of the session. Everyone gets the same structured written summary — the shared understanding is documented at the source before anyone re-interprets the data contract differently.

Built for data engineers who ship.

Snap a whiteboard. Ship the action plan. In ten seconds.

Free · 1 project, 30 boards Pro $9.99/mo · everything unlimited Pro $69.99/yr · save 42%
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