Show HN: Git Timeline Generator – Visualize contributions to any Git project

For something more abstract and "pretty":

I've used gource[0] in the past to visualise the growth of a product to org members outside of tech.

One particular success story for was contributing to a presentation showing how the tech dept had made a success of expansion. It got some audible "ooo"s like a fireworks display does

[0]: https://gource.io/

Might I recommend using the following command to generate the CSV file:

    git log --full-history --date=short --pretty=format:"%ad,%aN" > gitlog.csv

The only difference is changing %an to %aN. This leverages the existence of the .mailmap file to resolve author names, which is especially handy if any committers have ever changed their `user.email` configuration, and you'd like to associate them together.

This is super nice.

Used Gitpod to quickly run the Git command on our two repos prisma/prisma (https://gitpod.io/#https://github.com/prisma/prisma) and prisma/prisma-engines, downloaded the files, then spent 5 minutes to remove some bots and combine some users, and tadaaa: https://www.preceden.com/git/prisma-prisma-contributors/8303... + https://www.preceden.com/git/prisma-engines-contributors/830...

I worked at a startup a number of years back where we had some pretty cool timeline software. I always tried to push using git and github integrations as our goto market product. I got shutdown though. :) We also were integrating Slack and pivotal tracker as well; it really was a novel way to look at all the data.

They never did find a product-market fit though. It really was more a case of analysis paralysis versus not finding a fit. We never really even attempted to launch a product the two years I was there. I think they could have found a fit if they took more of the lean approach to try something, get feedback, and iterate.

One thing I've always wanted to see visualized if how the distribution of authorship of code evolve over time. Who wrote most of the code? Does that code remains or does it get rewritten? Who wrote the most foundational and time resistant code?

This is only limited to the top 50 contributors?

Also would be nice if the lines are sorted by last commit date, so that we can see a cascade graph of people joining/leaving the project as time goes by.

Will this work with commit name "Average Correction, Esquire"? Does it support tab as a separator?

This is built into fossil-scm

I thought it will be doing it locally, it uploads the CSV to server. Please also provide a way to delete the timeline.