Code_swarm. An experiment in organic software visualization. | Hacker News Reader

Code_swarm. An experiment in organic software visualization.

vis.cs.ucdavis.edu

86 pointsacangiano19 comments

You should really indicate in the title that this is a visualization of the commit history of people in famous open source projects.

But I was really taken away by it. I have new respect for the patience of language developers. They just keep plugging away!

Thanks to whomever modded the title. Saying 'WOW' just doesn't compare with describing why something is interesting.

The movie for the Eclipse project is incredibly beautiful. It's amazing to see so many people working so hard and so consistently on something.

My wish? A visualization, like this, of the wikipedia project -- all or parts of it.

I mailed the one who mailed these, and he pointed me towards the following wikipedia visualization project, which I found pretty cool.

http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/projects/history_flow/

A more modest real-time visualization I made some time ago: http://www.lkozma.net/wpv

These visualizations are beautiful. What would make it considerably more interesting would be access to the code so we could run it against our own projects, or perhaps integration into something like http://www.ohloh.net/

Yeah, I was disappointed that he didn't have any code up for download.

I would have loved to have run that on corporate SCMs.

I too wanted to do this.

I keep finding my way back there just in case it opens up.

There are two code bases you would need, both in python it seems. The first is the visualization itself, and the second is the code that takes a full repository dump and parses it into a normalized postgres database. I actually wrote the latter, with a nod from the professor that paid me some poor undergrad research wage to create it, I could probably publish it.

What I thought was amazing was that there were really only about 5 developers that worked on Python until version 2.0 in 2000. Guido essentially plugged away at that project for 9 years with just a little help before it took off. Amazing.

Yeah, I wonder what that's like - going from just you and maybe a couple other guys to suddenly having to manage the whole world.

I think there were more developers but a few of them had a right to commit. Guido could commit patches supplied by other people, therefore these people do not show up in the visualization.

This has so many good lessons in it.

First off dont' expect anything to take off without years of hard work.

Second it takes about 10 years for things to really catch on in software,standards,technology.

Third, many times is is only the creator or a few people keeping large languages and frameworks alive.

Fourth, when you get hired at Google you are officially a rockstar if they use the language you created 10 years prior.

Go Guido go...this visualization is intensely inspiring, of course I am talking about the Python one the most.

It would be nice to know what the algorithm is for the movement and location of developer names, since that isn't made clear on the project page. It seems to have something to do with the average location of the files when they light up and start flying. If that's the case, what's the algorithm for the location of the appearing files?

Without knowing some of the finer details of what is going on, I find it to be more entertaining than educational. Can we learn something other than a general idea and appreciation of the activity that went into a project?

Looks like they place dots around the edges of the screen (randomly) when the document is first committed. Then the physics model pulls in with some linear (to distance) force to developers that have committed to it. Developers repulse everything at a force square to the distance of the object, so that documents find equilibrium at a ring.

Very cool! One thing I didn't like was that the more important collaborators were impossible to read by the end, while the peripheral ones were easier to read, because they weren't jumbled up in the middle.

On the other hand surely that is an excellent visualization of thankless dedication and becoming something bigger than yourself. "Individuality is a bourgeoisie abstraction." -some crazy maoist postman (seriously).

Totally amazed. I would love to get this and import our SVN data for the last few years. Would be a great internal present to send to the engineering team.

This is a very good use of visualization. Best thing I have seen in some time using it. Almost biological...

I wish they did Drupal next :)

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