
Code_swarm. An experiment in organic software visualization. - acangiano
http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ogawa/codeswarm/
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DaniFong
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!

~~~
DaniFong
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.

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

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scw
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/>

~~~
engtech
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.

~~~
buro9
I too wanted to do this.

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

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iamelgringo
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.

~~~
d0mine
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.

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drawkbox
This has so many good lessons in it.

First off dont' expect anything to take off without year __s __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.

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sofal
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?

~~~
acgourley
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.

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llimllib
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.

~~~
shaunxcode
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).

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geuis
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.

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

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FiReaNG3L
I wish they did Drupal next :)

