I’m a fan of visualization. In the past I’ve released a few visualization tools such as Python Call Graph and Wireless Heatmap. One Friday afternoon I decided to run code_swarm on our Subversion repository which has all the code for inthemix, Faster Louder, and all our other websites. code_swarm visualizes a Subversion repository over time. The repository is up to about 30,000 revisions, which began on Tuesday, 27th of July 2004.

Below is the video showing one dot per file with the user name of the user committing the file in the middle of the swarm of dots. The blue dots are PHP files, yellow dots are HTML files and green dots being Smarty template files. Other types of files are just white dots. The large swarm of files are usually when we do branch merging.