Hey, you can see my name appear in this video!



It's a visualisation of the contributions to VTK, an open source project that I did some work on a few years ago (just a few tiny things really), and still use all the time. It's a code swarm video, with contributions arranged by proximity to the developers who made them. The changing date is in the lower right corner.

Here's a similar visualisation of the Python project, showing a sudden increase in around 2000 when Python really took off.



This form of dynamic graphing is a bit like that amazing TED talk from last year, showing bubble graphs of the economic and social performance of different countries over time: Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset.

But the difference here is that in the TED talk he's using numerical figures. With the source code changes it's just a set of text files being edited by different people. The spatial layout is computed (presumably) by graph visualisation algorithms simply from the associations between which developers worked on which files at what dates. And while there are many ways of doing that, finding a way that actually makes visual sense is impressive. And with the music on the Python one it's rather beautiful.

This post was originally on LiveJournal.