[HN Gopher] Gource - Animate your Git history
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Gource - Animate your Git history
Author : hyperific
Score : 125 points
Date : 2023-04-06 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gource.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (gource.io)
| sendfoods wrote:
| slightly embarrassing Gource story...Was part of a group
| assignment (about 7 people each) and pushed the entire generated
| Doxygen site without realizing it.
|
| After the assignment, the professor used Gource to visualize the
| codebase of each group. Needless to say the Gource graph blew up
| and I was the butt of every git related joke for a while.
| arjonagelhout wrote:
| I have used this a couple of times for a codebase I started work
| on 6 months ago. It's incredibly rewarding to see branches dying
| off after a successful refactor.
|
| It also helped me to make more tangible to friends and family the
| amount of effort required to write software.
| bb88 wrote:
| 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.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| 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.
| bb88 wrote:
| Only a handful of people noticed it frankly, and it was one
| of 200 other visualizations on a video loop.
| goldenpreppy8 wrote:
| Shows how human activity such as git history is quite simlar to
| how evolution branches and (git programs forks) and some branches
| dies off and the one that survives is the current way haha
| tombert wrote:
| 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?
| Art_Wolf wrote:
| Same, we used it for a bit to demonstrate the quantity of work
| that underly the feature requests to the business. Sure, you
| see a new button, but HERE is the rest of the iceberg...
| shaunofthedev wrote:
| At an agency I worked for, we'd play back the gource during a
| project retro. An opportunity to reflect, or see which surprise
| characters turned up to throw something at the codebase.
|
| I personally enjoyed those sessions, it gave non-coders an
| opportunity to point and ask questions about various clusters
| of nodes or find out why we were working on certain things at
| particular times.
|
| The value was debatable to be sure. Fun though.
| jackcviers3 wrote:
| 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.
| ojosilva wrote:
| We actually created a Gource-export plugin for our product like 6
| years ago.
|
| It would export our data structures and user activity as a git-
| like log that Gource could ingest. Then we would create videos
| that would be posted internally at different product dashboards
| or used for making a cool demo.
|
| We even ended up writing our own JS-based gource, using the C3.js
| library IIRC. It could ingest more specific activity and history
| that Gource wouldn't. It didn't have all the shiny visual effects
| though.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Always fun to run on any repo every year or so.
|
| We ran it on our startup and it was really a proud moment as
| founding engineers.
| ssalka wrote:
| One of the first things I do any time I start a new job or enter
| a new repository is run Gource - it gives me an initial sense of
| several things:
|
| * Project structure (how flat vs hierarchical is the file tree?)
|
| * Which files keep being edited (likely to find bugs and/or tech
| debt there)
|
| * Which areas different people tend to work in (eg, do they hop
| around a lot between client/server?)
|
| And of course it is just a fun thing to watch, and usually
| someone will walk by and ask about what I'm looking at, then
| they'll come watch with me.
| nico wrote:
| Would love to see something like this but that animates social
| media posts.
|
| See a post, then the likes going up, the messages getting
| pasted...
| e4e5 wrote:
| Or for a single user and how they comment, e.g. on Reddit where
| the subreddits could be the directories
| amarshall wrote:
| Well, see another comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35472315
|
| Which links to https://github.com/void4/reddgource
| 7373737373 wrote:
| I used it to visualize comment activity on Reddit:
| https://youtu.be/8ozKt3O8O4Y
| hyperific wrote:
| 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!
| azubinski wrote:
| This is one of the rare impeccably aesthetic programs.
| amake wrote:
| What does "aesthetic" mean to you in this context?
| MaxLeiter wrote:
| I discovered Gource back in 2013 when Minecraft released an
| animation of their first 800+ days of dev:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRjTyRly5WA
| cobertos wrote:
| Hah! I also discovered it from the same source and was just
| about to post the same link. That video made quite an impact on
| me.
| [deleted]
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