[HN Gopher] Gource - Animate your Git history ___________________________________________________________________ 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] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-04-06 23:00 UTC)