Ask HN: What are you using for system architecture diagraming? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are you using for system architecture diagraming?

6 pointsdpeck12 comments

Time to start doing some system diagramming to explain my design to others on the team and get feedback.

Is Visio still the best option? Or has something else gotten your attention lately?

I'm building a generic collaborative prototyping tool that I think works well for infrastructure diagrams, especially if you want something a bit more free-form. I wrote up a short tutorial here: https://precursorapp.com/blog/diagramming-with-precursor

Looks pretty neat!

Any plans to move it to mobile for touch surfaces?

Don't underestimate the effectiveness of 3x5 cards & string, or of whiteboards. Particularly if you want to change your design in addition to just documenting it. It won't be persistent (unless you take a photo of it), but you can really quickly iterate and find opportunities for simplification.

My personal favorite (on Mac) is Monodraw (http://monodraw.helftone.com/)

How does this compare to Omnigraffle? Too bad I didn't find it when looking for such a tool.

Omnigraffle works fine but I prefer this solely because of the ASCII output

ArgoUML[1] is pretty decent, though has few updates recently.

1 - http://argouml.tigris.org

+1 for ArgoUML. After created the diagram, I usually just did a C&P to Google Docs / Evernote as document. It is very convenience.

Visio is terrible at UML. Fortunately there are 3rd party stencils available which make it much better.

Whatever you do, go for a drawing tool (Visio, Omnigraffle) and not a UML tool (Visual paradigm, Enterprise architect). The latter are too complicated and expect that the diagram is correct from a UML standard perspective, which unless you're generating code is useless and cumbersome to do.

I used Dia (http://dia-installer.de/) and Lucidchart (https://www.lucidchart.com) in the past. It's not ideal but it can do the job.

Big white papers are the best! I love sketching it out a few times, and throw some of them.

Until it reaches a diagram that I would actually like, then I will transform it to this FREE googleDrive tool called (draw.io).

I'm a long time user of Visio but lately I've been using online diagram tools like Gliffy, especially for some UML.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com