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Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

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Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#21

Post by wattenberger »

juancampa wrote: post #20

This is cool but using rectangles instead of circles would help this visualization. Circles waste real estate and not friendly to labels (e.g. curved text that is harder to read)

There are definitely many trade-offs with using a circle pack layout - I snuck a bit of the reasoning into the collapsed section halfway through the write-up! Overall, this layout worked best for me, with the nesting feeling very natural and the circles feeling very "atomic".

But big picture, this write-up isn't tied to the current visualization! It's more focused on exploring _how_ a visual representation could help our understanding of codebases. There are tons of jumping off points, including different vizes!

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#23

Post by akdas »

I worked on something like this a few years ago, only in VR so you could walk around the visualization and use your spatial recognition abilities in 3D.

One part we struggled with was evolving the visualization with the codebase. I see in the demos at the bottom that small changes to the codebase can have a large impact on the visualization (unless I'm missing something), making it difficult to treat the visualization as a fingerprint over time. I wonder if there are plans to address this.

This is an area I'm very interested in, happy to chat about it any time.

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#24

Post by hevalon »

Personally I find it interesting as tools like these have been helping me to understand the team's and delivery dynamics when I'm joining new dev-teams.

This particular is great, as it reminds me of a book that I had read a while back; Your Code as a Crime Scene [1] by Adam Tornhill.

Adam is trying to explain something similar, but takes the whole concept onto the next level by explaining how tech debt and hidden coupling can be discovered using the git history and similar file structure visualisations.

[1] https://pragprog.com/titles/atcrime/your-code-as-a-crime-sce...

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#26

Post by er4hn »

Very fun! Would a similar visualization work for showing the insides of a go binary?

It would be super cool to have a way to visualize how different modules add bloat in size (and may pull in other bloaty modules as well)

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#27

Post by dale_glass »

akdas wrote: post #23

I worked on something like this a few years ago, only in VR so you could walk around the visualization and use your spatial recognition abilities in 3D. One part we struggled with was evolving the visualization with the codebase. I see in the demos at the bottom that small changes to the codebase can have a large impact on the visualization (unless I'm missing something), making it difficult to treat the visualizatio…

That sounds interesting, can you give more details about that?

I work on Vircadia (https://vircadia.com/) and have been thinking for a while that it would be cool to have in-world visualizations of things like the project's structure and github activity. It's a big one, so perhaps the right 3D representation would make the project's structure more understandable at a glance.

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#28

Post by onefuncman »

rckrd wrote: post #18

My favorite tool for visualizing a codebase is Gource. Here's a 1 minute visualization of the Linux Kernel repository from 1991-2015 https://twitter.com/mattrickard/status/1423366779590430721

I used Gource to visualize a hackathon, we had everyone start from a templated repo so it was really easy to show the entirety of participants coding activity (albeit at a macro level)

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#30

Post by fire »

Oddly enough, the page partially loads, hangs, crashes the tab and attempts to reload, hangs, and then crashes the entire running mobile chrome instance on my phone.

I don't think I've ever seen that before! I'm guessing the page is just memory heavy and android 11's memory manager can't figure out how to deal with it.

( chrome mobile, pixel 3 xl, android 11 )

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