When I was working for a big fat company, it insisted that everything be put in a flowchart or a diagram. No one was allowed to submit more than a page unless there was a summary in the form of a flowchart or a diagram. Later, as I progressed through my career, I found that this process actually helped me to visualize the process. This process could be the flow of a program that somebody is trying to use, or the way in which a Web site is being navigated, or the information needed to extract from a database and present to the browser.

The big fat company was a Microsoft shop, of course, so we all used Visio. When I went looking for Visio, I was flabbergasted at the price, and since I now work for a small, agile, lean company, there is no budget for hundreds of dollars of software. That’s when I came across DIA. In the old days I followed directions and compiled everything myself, but hard-working programmers who know that others just don’t have the tools to compile everything, have come to the rescue and provided everything! Even, dare I say it, documentation!

That is, of course, if you need that sort of thing. So go here and have a happy diagramming life, whether it is simple org charts, Venn Diagrams, or complicated Pourbaix diagrams, DIA will fulfill your needs.

Tags: microface, project, open source, visio, dia, venn diagram, pourbaix