I write and speak lots about Kafka, and get a fair few questions from this. The most common question is actually nothing to do with Kafka, but instead: How do you make those cool diagrams? I wrote about this originally last year but since then have evolved my approach. I’ve now pretty much ditched Paper, in favour of Concepts. It was recommended to me after I published the previous post.

I write and speak lots about Kafka, and get a fair few questions from this. The most common question is actually nothing to do with Kafka, but instead: How do you make those cool diagrams? So here’s a short, and longer, answer! Update July 2019 I’ve moved away from Paper -> read more here tl;dr An iOS app called Paper, from a company called FiftyThree So, how DO you make those cool diagrams?

So you’ve got a code sample you want to share in a presentation, but whilst it looks beautiful in your text-editor with syntax highlighting, it’s fugly in Keynote? You could screenshot it and paste the image into your slide, but you just know that you’ll want to change that code, and end up re-snapshotting it…what a PITA. Better to have a nicely syntax-highlighted code snippet that you can paste as formatted text into Keynote and amend from there as needed.