Show HN: An interactive visual history of Git development
git-history.jpalmer.dev
Show HN: An interactive visual history of Git development
1–10 of 24 posts
Re: Show HN: An interactive visual history of Git development
#2OP here.
I wrote up some additional details on how this was created on my blog: https://jpalmer.dev/2021/05/interactive-git-history/.
If anyone has ideas about milestones that I could add to that would make the timeline more interesting/informative, or any other feedback, please let me know.
Happy to answer any questions here.
Re: Show HN: An interactive visual history of Git development
#3Wow, from the data viz perspective this is super impressive. The amount of data you managed to display and how you organized it is very impressive.
Maybe it's the amount of information, but I don't really know what to make of all that data. What conclusions did you arrive to? Where would you point someone like me who feels overwhelmed with all the information on screen?
And finally, do you see yourself turning this into a more generic visualization tool for git repos in general?
Re: Show HN: An interactive visual history of Git development
#4was totally expecting a gif of linus shitting on the community whilst academia open their mouths wide expectantly...
Re: Show HN: An interactive visual history of Git development
#5OP here. I wrote up some additional details on how this was created on my blog: https://jpalmer.dev/2021/05/interactive-git-history/ . If anyone has ideas about milestones that I could add to that would make the timeline more interesting/informative, or any other feedback, please let me know. Happy to answer any questions here.
Neat! Thanks for sharing.
>Note: This visualization was designed for screens larger than 1024 x 1024 and for desktop-style interactions.
Why am I getting this warning on my 4K UHD display? Both Firefox 89 and Chrome 91 on Ubuntu.
Re: Show HN: An interactive visual history of Git development
#6OP here. I wrote up some additional details on how this was created on my blog: https://jpalmer.dev/2021/05/interactive-git-history/ . If anyone has ideas about milestones that I could add to that would make the timeline more interesting/informative, or any other feedback, please let me know. Happy to answer any questions here.
Neat! Thanks for sharing. >Note: This visualization was designed for screens larger than 1024 x 1024 and for desktop-style interactions. Why am I getting this warning on my 4K UHD display? Both Firefox 89 and Chrome 91 on Ubuntu.
Because I am terrible at making CSS do what I want, unfortunately.
Seriously, though, I think I do some type of aspect ratio check - maybe that's the culprit.
Re: Show HN: An interactive visual history of Git development
#7OP here. I wrote up some additional details on how this was created on my blog: https://jpalmer.dev/2021/05/interactive-git-history/ . If anyone has ideas about milestones that I could add to that would make the timeline more interesting/informative, or any other feedback, please let me know. Happy to answer any questions here.
This is really cool. I started a project in a similar vein a few years back that I loosely called "What Did I Do" that would allow you to track blame / "ownership" over time. I could write out content to the command line, but once it got to the point of starting to put visualizations into the browser (in fact, I also went the D3 route), I started to lose drive. Finding a way to make it visually appealing escaped me - but you've captured it well here, I think. With the work you've done, can you also represent other repositories, or is this heavily focused on the Git repo specifically?
Re: Show HN: An interactive visual history of Git development
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neat! Thanks for sharing. >Note: This visualization was designed for screens larger than 1024 x 1024 and for desktop-style interactions. Why am I getting this warning on my 4K UHD display? Both Firefox 89 and Chrome 91 on Ubuntu.
Because I am terrible at making CSS do what I want, unfortunately. Seriously, though, I think I do some type of aspect ratio check - maybe that's the culprit.
Ah, so not sure how you're checking, but it looks like your thresholds might be just too aggressive: it looks like my window.innerHeight [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/inne...
Re: Show HN: An interactive visual history of Git development
#9OP here. I wrote up some additional details on how this was created on my blog: https://jpalmer.dev/2021/05/interactive-git-history/ . If anyone has ideas about milestones that I could add to that would make the timeline more interesting/informative, or any other feedback, please let me know. Happy to answer any questions here.
After a user clicks on the streamgraph, the bottom-left displays information about commits by the corresponding contributor in the corresponding quarter; the contributor name is already a link to their GitHub profiles, but the "changes" count could also be made a link to the actual commits.
These links would have the format:
https://github.com/git/git/commits?author=gitster&since=2005...
or
https://github.com/git/git/commits?author=gitster@pobox.com&...
Re: Show HN: An interactive visual history of Git development
#10Wow, from the data viz perspective this is super impressive. The amount of data you managed to display and how you organized it is very impressive. Maybe it's the amount of information, but I don't really know what to make of all that data. What conclusions did you arrive to? Where would you point someone like me who feels overwhelmed with all the information on screen? And finally, do you see yourself turning this i…
Thanks!
I had two goals (at least) in mind while making this:
1) Experiment with some visualization approaches that I hadn't tried before. The annotated streamgraph, etc. 2) Tell the story of the history of git as a way to demonstrate just how many contributions go into complex open source software.
I definitely got what I wanted out of the experience for the first goal - a large project like this (for me) taught me a lot about how to approach and structure this type of effort, and the limits of some of the technologies that I used.
Regarding the second goal, I had wanted to layer on more of a narrative (using some type of scrollytelling or something similar), but I ended up realizing that that was going to be too difficult with the structure that I had created, so I ended up adding the annotations and leaving some of the narrative reconstruction up to the viewer. If I were to go back to this work, that's what I would try to refine.
In terms of open source, I will do that but haven't yet because things are a bit of a mess and I was honestly tired of looking at it. I'll probably go back to that in a bit.
Applying this to another repository in its current state would require a decent amount of manual data extraction/cleaning, but it's possible. I'm not convinced the results would be that interesting, however. I tried it myself as an experiment and was surprised how linear/regular some of the other repos were.