Knut Sveidqvist
📍 Sweden · Diagrams from text, like Markdown for visuals
Who
Knut Sveidqvist is a Swedish developer who believed that creating diagrams shouldn't require expensive software or design skills. He built Mermaid.js — a tool that generates diagrams from simple text descriptions, the way Markdown generates formatted text from plain characters.
The Moment
Knut was tired of switching between code editors and diagramming tools. Every time he needed a flowchart or sequence diagram, it meant opening a separate application, dragging boxes around, exporting images, and embedding them. He thought: what if diagrams could live inside the same Markdown files as everything else?
What It Does
Mermaid.js turns plain text into beautiful diagrams — flowcharts, sequence diagrams, Gantt charts, entity-relationship diagrams, and more. You write text like 'A --> B' and it renders an arrow from A to B. It runs entirely in the browser with zero cost, zero servers, zero subscriptions.
Impact
74,000 GitHub stars. Over 8 million estimated users. GitHub natively renders Mermaid diagrams in Markdown files. It's embedded in Notion, GitLab, Obsidian, and dozens of other tools. And yet — Knut Sveidqvist has 3 followers on Medium.
Connections
Mermaid.js is why this project exists. During the conversation that sparked Gratitude Graph, Pedro discovered Mermaid while building Node Zero and realized: the open source ecosystem has no mechanism for gratitude. Knut's tool was the lens that made the invisible visible.