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Show HN: GitHub Commit Visualiser

github-vis.ably.dev

20 pointsthisisjofrank12 comments

I built a tool which you can use to visualise your git commits at an org or repository level. It shows just how much work an engineering team, or even an individual does, that often goes unseen by non-dev teams.

You can read about the build here: https://ably.com/blog/visualize-your-commits-in-realtime-wit...

Repo is here: https://github.com/ably-labs/github-commit-visualizer

You can deploy your own to netlify (or provider of your choice) and start visualising your own project's commits in realtime.

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This looks interesting, thanks for sharing. I've used gource a few times in the past (it's in the repos for most linux distros) and while I enjoy the occasional visualization, I've yet to find an actual use for it.

Has anybody found a real use case? It might be neat and helpful if a tool could show me everywhere that I've been committing too. In gource you can see an avatar for yourself bouncing around as the timeline advances. It would be cool to have a combined graphic of all the repos on my machine, although I'm sure that's a quite non-trivial implementation.

Link to Gource, for the curious: https://gource.io/

Pretty cool when you're added to a new project, have no idea what people have been working on for the past 2 months there and want to see where most of the actual effort was focused.

>Pretty cool when you're added to a new project, have no idea what people have been working on for the past 2 months there and want to see where most of the actual effort was focused.

That's a neat idea!

I'm absolutely open to PRs or issues if there are any features you'd like to see.

Off the top of my head I'd love to add support for usernames on the nodes, so you can see who has done what work.

Nothing can compare to Gource [1]

[1] https://gource.io/

Absolutely my inspiration. Mentioned in the blog post.

I’m not commenting to denigrate or dismiss your effort, and I’m sure someone else will find value in it. But this jumped out at me:

> It shows just how much work an engineering team, or even an individual does, that often goes unseen by non-dev teams.

I can sometimes produce a flurry of small and insignificant commits, or spend weeks to produce just one. Frequency or volume of commits probably is a better measure of how organized a person is, and how predictable their task is, than the amount of work they’ve performed. It might be a better measure than lines of code, but I don’t know that it’s meaningfully better.

That's a good point, but I guess for non-tech people activity => work and no activity => no work, so at that level it illustrates reasonably well, no?

Perhaps, just maybe, you might consider the fact that non tech people can understand things

This is just Goodhart's Law in action.

> activity => work and no activity => no work

Measuring activity, where by "activity" we mean "commits", means that a person who mentors other people, reviews thousands of lines of other people's code, and discusses that code in depth during long hours of meetings, does completely no work. I think you can see where such a measure can lead to.

This was really a throw away comment about unseen work, the real point is that its a nice visualisation of your team's activity for a period. Often bug fixes or tech debt can go unseen by the rest of the company, but this is a nice way to see what's been touched. Rather than an indication of quantity over quality.

At my last company, we tried to measure productivity. It's a rabbit hole within a rabbit hole. You might see a single commit with 2 lines of code after a week of no activity, and those 2 lines might have legitimately taken an entire week.

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