Visualization of DHH's commits to Ruby on Rails from 2004-09 [video] | Hacker News Reader

Visualization of DHH's commits to Ruby on Rails from 2004-09 [video]

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14 pointsgrinich13 comments

Sometimes I see such visualizations and it makes me depressed.

I'm a day dreamer most days and any other days I feel like it takes me twice as long to get productive with a certain framework than it does other colleagues.

But I have other visions and I see the bigger picture and at some points there are ideas, BIG ideas that no else seems to get excited about BUT I can get excited about and I think to myself "You're so slow, how are you ever going to get to the end of your vision?"

So maybe that's my big challenge, how do I make my vision complete? Do I use Rent A Coder? Do I code it myself and not worry about a time line because time constraints are just worries made up my by subconscious?

I don't think I will ever work at the speed of DHH, Jamis Buck, or any other contributor.

But I think I have a vision. And I will complete it.

The secret is: there is no genius programmer. One just needs to stop worrying start with something and eventually it will turn into a success which will make other people assume that you are the genius programmer. But there really isnt such a thing.

Two quotes:

"Do not worry about what others have done for there will always be both greater and lesser people than you"

"It takes years to build an overnight success"

The story to take away from this is how much GitHub can add to a project's contributions. I'm sure Rails' popularity didn't hurt either. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0ji8FDNTj0#t=5m10s for the GH migration.

No kidding. GitHub absolutely exploded the number of contributors to Rails (at least, judging by this visualization).

My instinct is that it's just increasing the number of attributed commits. Before Github the committer was always whichever user actually committed it, here the committer is the author.

Why? Git logs both author and committer. When you apply patches from the fork queue, the author is the original author and you are the committer. So any stats that look at committer would be ... wrong, github or not.

Right github would record the author as being the person. SVN has no conception of an author/committer distinction.

Oh right, Rails was originally SVN.

I wiped the SVN era from my memories as a way of coping with the pain it caused me.

The question though is, is that necessarily always a good thing? Do more chefs mean better meals?

I did one of these yesterday for myself. Great, great fun (Google for [gource]). I was hoping to blog about it but the video ended up being too gigantic for me to load into my Ubuntu VM to transcode in any reasonable amount of time.

Here's a link to the sourcecode: http://code.google.com/p/gource/

Or you can watch a video of DHH winning a recent motor race: http://youtu.be/ef-CtcXM89g

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