
Show HN: Code Collaboration Charts - n16e
https://www.networkperspective.io/for-code/
======
n16e
Creator here. In this project I tried to bring a new perspective on code
repository, transform "git log" into a contributor collaboration network,
display it nicely and try to make it useful and hopefully interesting. I'd
very much appreciate your feedback.

~~~
ygra
As someone who works in graph visualization, this looks like just another case
of a default hairball visualization (those often arise when combining force-
directed layout with dense graphs): beautiful pictures (in the sense of nice
to hang it on the wall), but rather useless as a visualization.

Looking at the various hairballs it would be more helpful to render simple
HTML lists ordered by some graph analysis algorithm results (centralities,
etc.) What you “see” in these diagrams is mostly a listing of nodes sorted by
degree (and you can't even tell the exact degree). Also, nearness often
indicates relationships that simply aren't there.

It might be better to find a set of use-cases that describe how users of the
app find answers to real-world questions they have, and then add interaction
to the diagram that helps the users in answering these questions. Right now,
basically the only answers it provides: who had the highest number of
interactions. And for many cases, you can't even read the names of those that
the people interacted with because labels there are dozens of overlapping
labels.

~~~
n16e
The overview of a bigger repository looks kinda like a hairball, but the ui
lets dig deeper, and filter the graph by "code areas" (paths) or
organizations.

I was thinking about a few use cases like these that come first to my mind:

\- for open source - assessing if a framework (repo) might have a bus factor
problem. Take Vue [https://bit.ly/2nVxsh5](https://bit.ly/2nVxsh5) and React
[https://bit.ly/31njWR3](https://bit.ly/31njWR3) . It is easy to see that if
Evan for any reason drops Vue then it might be a problem

\- I imagine a bus factor is even a bigger problem also for closed source
projects

\- for developers - quickly finding experts in a some area of the project
(especially a bigger one with few 100s developers). The ones more connected
are also more likely to answer your questions - eventually they are well
connected for a reason.

\- for community managers - well each open source project is a community and
this is its visualization - so yeah you usually know the top contributors in
the community but there might be more people that you might try to involve and
engage more in the project. The tool lets you browse the connections in the
repository and gives you more social context.

\- for non-technical managers / hr - well... they have hard time browsing
github as it's full of code (of course it is). This gives them another
perspective and insight how works get done within a project (open or close
sorce). Though I am not super sure if showing a network is more friendly than
showing a code, but that is a common way of showing social structures in
sociology for instance - so yeah humanities area.

But maybe showing last 30 days of collaboration would untangle the hairball
and give more actual info - this is something I working on now - and your
comment tells that this might be important.

Thank you for your feedback. If you have some thoughts on the use cases I
wrote or others please share. Thank you!

