Ask HN: What tools do you use for system design?

34 points·choochooboogalu··9 comments

These days, I am doing a lot of high-level systems architecture. I'm looking for a tool that strikes the right balance between speed of delivery and quality of diagram. What do you use?

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Whiteboard and then a design doc [1] on Google Docs.

[1] - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mffMF9FaUJ3WwRmKNJGMBxfn...

Whimsical [1] is an amazing tool for creating system designs and sequence diagrams.

[1] - https://whimsical.com

We’ve started to use PlantUML for diagrams on the systems and software team. It allows for the diagram source to be stored in version control and has built in support in our Wiki and VSCode.

http://plantuml.com/

I've been using OmniGraffle[1] for that purpose for the past couple of years. Very satisfied with it.

[1] - https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle

This doesn’t necessary answer your question but I use an iPad, Apple Pencil and Notability for all design and then usually write a document with included sketches where relevant.

I like to use yed! It works for both flow charts and system organization charts.

https://www.yworks.com/products/yed

I find that sequence diagrams can be really helpful when documenting systems. Here's a nifty web UI for creating them: https://sequencediagram.org/

Lately I've been using SimpleDiagrams [1]. The sketch look and the simpler UI is a nice change from Visio.

[1] https://www.simplediagrams.com/

https://draw.io/ is great

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