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Gource – Animate your Git history

gource.io

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Re: Gource – Animate your Git history

#22

I used it to visualize comment activity on Reddit: https://youtu.be/8ozKt3O8O4Y

That was incredible to watch. You can clearly see when the conversation tapers off and then it must have gone viral because it suddenly explodes with activity. Thanks for sharing!

Re: Gource – Animate your Git history

#23
post #6

I remember hearing about this ten years ago, and I played with it, and it's cool enough, though for the life of me I have not been able to figure out anything actually useful to do with it. Does anyone use it as part of their actual workflow?

It is a direct visualization of churn. You can really tell when some area of the codebase changes every single day. Probably means that you need to break whatever is attracting all the attention apart.

Re: Gource – Animate your Git history

#24
post #12

One company I worked for in the past made visualizations of the work being done. They took a repo I was working in, turned it into a gource video and displayed it on the 40 foot screen in the lobby. And there was my name. Making huge changes causing the tree to fork. It was pretty cool.

Honestly I find that a bit weird. Maybe I'm too introverted but I would be too embarrassed for my work flow to be put on the spot like that.

Only a handful of people noticed it frankly, and it was one of 200 other visualizations on a video loop.

Re: Gource – Animate your Git history

#25
I switch from being a musician by profession to software development because I got burned out and music stopped feeling like art. Ever since I left, I feel like engineering has become my new preferred means of artistic expression. This project is so cool in how it shows the process and craft of software and how it is carved, smoothed and honed into a “final product”. And much like in conventional art, it’s hard for the artist to call the job done and stop improving on it.

Re: Gource – Animate your Git history

#29
If you find this type of codebase visualisation useful, you might want to checkout codeatlas.dev and its Github Action (https://github.com/codeatlasHQ/codebase-visualizer-action). It doesn't animate the repo over time like gource (yet), but instead aims to give a beautiful interactive visual snapshot of a repo at a particular point in time. It also lets you zoom in on specific aspects like recent commit activity, programming language and hopefully in the future test coverage.

E.g. see here for a visualisation of the pytorch codebase we did a while ago: https://codeatlas.dev/gallery/pytorch/pytorch

(disclaimer: I'm the author)

Re: Gource – Animate your Git history

#30

I switch from being a musician by profession to software development because I got burned out and music stopped feeling like art. Ever since I left, I feel like engineering has become my new preferred means of artistic expression. This project is so cool in how it shows the process and craft of software and how it is carved, smoothed and honed into a “final product”. And much like in conventional art, it’s hard for t…

This was a video which reminded me that art (visual design, music) can fit into software/games and still be fun and small https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXUiyK1olZ8
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