Man, I just was browsing around on Mastodon a couple weeks ago and found an architect that said he was using a tool for this sort of thing, and it was one I never heard of before and it looked like it was good. And now I can't find it again. All I remember is that it was text files that had a certain file extension of more than three letters.
At any rate, architecture diagrams are drawn in a lot of different contexts. I find myself reaching for these tools:
If I'm screen-sharing and want to draw something really quickly in a collaborative sense with others, I use Flying Logic. You can basically draw this as fast as you talk to each other. You could substitute that for any other drawing app that will automatically lay out as you draw. It basically runs a Sugiyama-type layered algorithm in a loop, and it supports groups and nesting. Sometimes I'll export these drawings into wikis, but it's more for a general sense - it's really just labeled boxes and arrows.
If I want to quickly put together something more detailed that will again be used only for reference, and not as a living document, I'll sketch something up in Excalidraw (free version) and export it. It still find it a little too fiddly for drawing live with an audience, but it has more flexibility than Flying Logic since you can also write text outside of the boxes and arrows.
But for stuff that needs to be more official and/or be edited, I'm all-in on the diagrams-as-text thing. I just haven't find the right tool yet. I feel like mermaid and plantuml are a venn diagram and haven't really committed to either. There's also that crazy python one that has all the AWS-branded diagram elements but it's too finicky to pull up quickly.
I have been using Excalidraw for both use cases 1 and 2 with (subjectively) great results. A few points to use it for live sketching:
* Having a consistent whiteboard orientation. In my area of work I deal with data pipelines. Sources are always on the left, consumers - always to the right
* Only one or two types shapes should be used - to me, rectangle covers pretty much anything. A blackbox system? It's a square. Some logical domain? Rectangle. A specific interface? Maybe use a diamond or a circle. Excalidraw uses numbers for shortcuts, so those are always at the fingertips.
* Colors should be kept to a minimum. 3-4 is plenty. Select a shape, "s" for the line color/"g" for fill color.
* At the end of the day all systems exist to help humans. A human figure(stick one, from Excalidraw most downloaded libraries) should pretty much always be on the diagram.
At any rate, architecture diagrams are drawn in a lot of different contexts. I find myself reaching for these tools:
If I'm screen-sharing and want to draw something really quickly in a collaborative sense with others, I use Flying Logic. You can basically draw this as fast as you talk to each other. You could substitute that for any other drawing app that will automatically lay out as you draw. It basically runs a Sugiyama-type layered algorithm in a loop, and it supports groups and nesting. Sometimes I'll export these drawings into wikis, but it's more for a general sense - it's really just labeled boxes and arrows.
If I want to quickly put together something more detailed that will again be used only for reference, and not as a living document, I'll sketch something up in Excalidraw (free version) and export it. It still find it a little too fiddly for drawing live with an audience, but it has more flexibility than Flying Logic since you can also write text outside of the boxes and arrows.
But for stuff that needs to be more official and/or be edited, I'm all-in on the diagrams-as-text thing. I just haven't find the right tool yet. I feel like mermaid and plantuml are a venn diagram and haven't really committed to either. There's also that crazy python one that has all the AWS-branded diagram elements but it's too finicky to pull up quickly.