Activity charts and software development
I've mentioned before that some of my code, most notably several of my custom Minecraft plugins, are now available on GitHub. When I work, I usually save my work in various bites, each containing a feature or specific change. These are called commits and let you track your changes in a project, and possibly review / cancel them if problems arise. These can be as simple as changing the color of an item to adding a whole new feature. Having individual changes logged can be very valuable.
Each GitHub profile includes an activity chart showing the numbers of commits done each day for the past year. The darker the color, the more commits were done in that day. Here's what mine looks like as of this posting:
Nice! But it's also woefully incomplete, because it only includes my code that's available on GitHub! Several other projects, such as the websites, the CL Companion, private plugins and more won't show on this chart.
As such, I set out to create my own visualisation tool, able to read all commits across all projects instead of only the ones publicly available. Here's what I came up with:
That's a lot more colored dots, isn't it? This makes it a much more accurate indicator of how many times I push a feature or change each day. After some polishing, I'm planning to add this somewhere on the main Interordi site, likely in my portfolio.
“But Doc, I don't care about your commits chart!” Maybe not, and that's fine. :–) Showing my full range of commits was one goal, creating that chart type was another. Once completed, I plan to integrate such activity charts in multiple places. There's a limited version of it already available in your Creeper's Lab player profile; for now, it only includes the past year worth of playtime data. The idea is to give it more power by allowing you to browse back in time, up to the day you joined! The extra flexibility will make it even more valuable as a display tool.
– Doctacosa