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Visualizing Open Source Contributions

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the do-you-see-what-i-see dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A student at UC Davis has created some stunning visualizations of open source software contributions, including Eclipse, Python, Apache httpd and Postgres. From the website: 'This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.'"

8 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Needs flash 9 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Are there other sources for the videos for us Gnash users?

  2. Re:Can we do this with /.? by Amouth · · Score: 3, Interesting

    that would be really entertaining to watch.. expecialy if they get get a live feed going..

    i might even hook up another monitor and have it run as a screen saver and aim it at the hallway - and see who figures out what it is first

    --
    '...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
  3. Commits are a bad measure by pclminion · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Lots of commits isn't really a measure of developer productivity or worth. Among other things, it might just mean a scatter-brained developer who commits lots of unrelated, mostly useless changes, or somebody who continually writes bugs then has to back them out. More seasoned programmers will tend to make fewer, but larger commits.

    Something open source seems to lack in general is project stability. With so little central oversight, changes tend to happen without people really thinking things through, many times without any clear motivation for the change other than simply pumping out code in order to look "active."

    Software engineering as a discipline has been working for decades to come up with a heuristic to evaluate programmer productivity, and we're still nowhere close, although there are literally hundreds of formulas in use.

    Of course, it's flashy and cool, but I worry that this will only encourage people to make more commits instead of actually using their brains.

    1. Re:Commits are a bad measure by pclminion · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I have to agree that SE diverges in very important ways from other engineering disciplines. Perhaps it's not even engineering at all. There are certainly many people who think so. I'm not decided on it. But as long as the common term for it (whatever "it" is) is Software Engineering, that's what I'll use. After all, one important concept from ALL types of engineering is the importance of consistency of terminology (although in this case it's perhaps not consistent ACROSS disciplines, but that's not true of science either)

  4. Would make great movie credits. by srobert · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'd like to see that type of presentation used to show the credits for a film. You could color the contributions according to acting, camera, sound work, directing, etc.

  5. Neuromancer's Cyberspace Cometh by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Finally some visualizations of the Net (or bits of it) starting to be worthy of the descriptions William Gibson's http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson#Neuromancer_.281984.29_Neuromancer_ gave it in 1984:

    Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...


    Now if someone could make those visualizations interactive GUIs to archives and people, we might finally be getting somewhere. Someone wake me when we're in Stephenson's Metaverse, the home version of the game.
    --

    --
    make install -not war

  6. I'd like to see... by argent · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Linux kernel, Free/Net/OpenBSD, gcc, ... the core infrastructure

  7. Re:I'd like to see... by zish · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Goodness! Yes! As if the currently rendered series isn't mind blowing enough. What I think would really be incredible is to display all of the renders on a single page. This could enable one to visualize developer "cross-pollination".

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    Spork.

    P.S. Spork.