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Comment by lolsal | Hacker News Reader

I think the site is nice - it's clean and directly to the point. No huge hero and no click-throughs to get to the meat of your project. Prices for your posters seem entirely reasonable.

Tangent: I don't understand the fascination with one's own commit heatmap (or any other commit heatmap for that matter). Maybe it seems a bit too self-congratulatory? Vain? I don't know quite what it is, but it rubs me the wrong way and I wouldn't be interested in putting something up like that in my home or office. Maybe because it implies quantity over quality? Whatever the reason, your poster project is nice regardless of whether or not I would buy one.

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They way I look at it, its not about how many big dots you have, it tells the story of your time on that project.

I'd love to get this for my team after a major release.

"Ah heres when the whole site went down one Saturday"

"This was when we left for the week long offsite"

"Here is where we released and had to make a bunch of hotfixes but then look here we rarely had that problem after..."

A team commit heatmap would be great for the office tho...

That's a great idea

In that case, I think it'd be more interesting to throw it up on a large monitor and have it update every day.

> or any other commit heatmap for that matter

The problem with heatmaps and how they are currently used by popular tools, is they only provide novelty metrics. That is, metrics that are interesting to look at and nothing more.

Commit heatmaps are actually quite useful for answering a lot of questions, if used properly.

Here's an example, that shows how they can be used to help you navigate to the first commit.

https://gitsense.com/first-commit.mp4

They can be used to provide visual aid, to show how frequently certain files are modified.

https://gitsense.com/track-files.mp4

The second example is quite nice, I think.

But the first one will only work for the first commit, you can't really pinpoint any other one. Using a heatmap for that is probably even overkill.

> you can't really pinpoint any other one

Yeah the heatmap only really shines when it's sparse, as the noise can be too much. The heatmap is intended to be used as a secondary visual aid. What I normally recommend, is for people to use the line chart first, to help select larger swaths of time. And if you need to, use the heatmap to help you drill further. Below is an example of what I mean.

https://gitsense.com/search.mp4

There are still a lot of ways to improve the heatmap by using animation and other tricks, but I don't have the time to experiment with these ideas.

This is pretty interesting, but I don't know how useful it would be for me. Part of why I feel that way would be just because I don't have those use cases.

I guess part of it is I don't use GitHub as a UI to my repos either. When I want to find this information out I go exploring with log/blame.

The heatmaps and the graphs in general, or more to help you orient yourself, when having to deal with a lot of information. They make it very easy to view activity across multiple files, branches and repos at once.

For me personally, I mainly stick with the "Changes tree", which I prefer to use over log/blame. I'm particular not a fan of using blame, if I need to trace the history for a file, since it can get disorienting. I use what I've dubbed as rapid diffing, which makes it easier to see how a file evolved. Here's an example.

https://gitsense.com/rapid-diffing.mp4

Many technical writers use GitHub to write books so this makes it into the record of one's dedication to the 'streak' of consistent work. Nice history of how something (book, app version 1.0) was produced.

Yeah I think it's a sense of accomplishment. You worked on something really hard and seeing data to reflect that is fun.

That said posting it on a wall to say "Hey look what I've done" its a bit much for me. But I would defintely buy a poster for my engineering team, that would fantastic!

Purely bragging rights.

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