Super Easy Sequence Diagrams – PlantUML (plantuml.com)

A few weeks ago I monkeyed around with PlantUML in Emacs org-mode using babel. It's a great diagramming tool as an abstraction over Graphviz...it does not have to be used within the context of UML.

I found the PDF version of the PlantUML documentation a useful way to achieve noise reduction, http://plantuml.com/PlantUML_Language_Reference_Guide.pdf

I second that. I used this few days ago.

My team and i use plantuml exclusively for architectural diagrams and our output beats out that of other teams, it's not just a diagramming tool though, it's a DSL for uml and forces you to think carefully about how you design solutions

I love PlantUML! After a coworker introduced me to it at my old company, it quickly became my tool of choice for putting together security diagrams (I'm an AppSec engineer). I found it particularly helpful for this use case because it made diagram re-use, and updating existing diagrams when architecture changes are planned, extremely easy. We also used Confluence, for which there is a PlantUML plugin that allows you to insert your UML markup directly into a doc, which is then rendered by Confluence when someone views the page. I threw together a set of macros and sprites for AWS architecture and deployment diagrams, which I've put on GitHub[0] for anyone who finds it useful. Eventually planning to upload a fork I wrote that generically (and much much more efficiently) generates the templates and sprites for other services and products besides AWS.

[0]: https://github.com/milo-minderbinder/AWS-PlantUML