

The Absolute Most Useful Thing I've Done At My Job So Far - dhotson
http://dev.lookery.com/post/69447828/the-absolute-most-useful-thing-ive-done-at-my-job-so

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eru
Perhaps producing nice graphs out of textual logs could be a bigger business?
(I guess it already is.)

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dhotson
I think the most interesting thing for me was the whole idea of using tools
like this to visualize and monitor code with somewhat complicated
dependencies.

I'm pretty sure there'd be heaps of useful applications for this kind of tech.
Have you got something in particular in mind?

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eru
Not really. But I played around with graphviz for visualizing railroad
schedule graphs. It was quite pleasant --- and beats starring at the adjacency
lists.

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dhotson
Oh, something like train timetables? Or you mean something like generating
railroad maps?

Edit: While googling, I came across this <http://railroad.rubyforge.org> which
is also a pretty cool use of graphviz. But probably different to what you're
talking about. :)

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eru
Neither. Let me explain: In a train timetable every train goes from an A to a
B. Because we want to minimize the number of locomotives needed, we have to
reuse them. That means we have to decide what connection a locomotive serves
next after driving A->B on Monday morning.

Train timetables also usually live in a cycle time (i.e. it repeats after a
week).

So as a result you get a directed graph with the 'A->B's as vertices and the
transition between them as arcs.

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dhotson
Ah I think I've kinda got it. That's pretty cool.. thanks for explaining. :)

