Encompass complex thought with diagrams

The software project I’ve been building has grown to the point that it’s no longer simple enough that I can reason about it without the assistance of a diagramming tool. To my surprise, there are a proliferation of such tools, but few open source versions I could spin up today. Then I discovered PlantUML!

I was a little turned off by the simplistic website, but once I began to use the tool I was thoroughly impressed. I’ve written class, activity, and state diagrams for several parts of my codebase now, and the PlantUML diagram language has been a pleasure. It’s intuitive, structured without being unnecessarily rigid, and easily saved to a TXT file.

The PlantUML project is easily self-hosted as a Docker image - check it out! And if you find the tool fits your needs, become a patron ;)