[royalghost]

After the System Design Primer by Donne Martin got quite popular on Hacker News, I contacted Donne to find out which tools he used to draw those system architecture diagram and he was kind to respond my twitter message ( that is why twitter is so great ) to tell me it it is Omnigraffle ( only available in Mac and ios. )

10 years back I used to draw UML diagrams using Visio or one of the eclipse plugins for building systems diagram. However, the software landscape has changed quite a bit. On one of the podcasts of Martin Fowler recently, he also agreed that UML is now less favored standard in the software community.

Although I use Windows on my work but for the demo of the product I was working I built the system architecture diagram using my personal mac book and transfer to my work laptop to made a presentation. There was a good feedback and no-one raised any concern with UML or (any-)standards.

So, tool or IDE is less important these days, as we tend to use multiple tools/IDE based on the technology / framework / programming languages. I use intelliJ for Java, Sublime for Ruby / Rails + Angular + Others, Visual Studio for NodeJS, Vim for scripting, etc. etc....