2013-07-11 / Seamus Tuohy
One challenge of working on a software project is showing a non-developer the vibrancy of the code base. Since Commotion is being developed on multiple platforms and through a variety of interacting packages on each platform, we can’t even point at a specific code repository or downloadable to show what work has taken place. We recently became aware of Gource, a open-source project that aims to make this possible. As described on Gource’s website, “Software projects are displayed by Gource as an animated tree with the root directory of the project at its center. Directories appear as branches with files as leaves. Developers can be seen working on the tree at the times they contributed to the project.”
Commotion Development Progress from OTI Web Team on Vimeo. We made some tweaks to gource to remove much of the clutter, including the more than a dozen developers buzzing around the various projects, to make it easier to focus on how our projects have grown in the past couple of years. We do think our developers deserve loads of credit for the hard work that they do (one of us wrote this post).