This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Eric Hodel. Original Post: RubyGems code_swarm Feed Title: Segment7 Feed URL: http://blog.segment7.net/articles.rss Feed Description: Posts about and around Ruby, MetaRuby, ruby2c, ZenTest and work at The Robot Co-op. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Eric Hodel Latest Posts From Segment7

I built a code_swarm visualization of the RubyGems repository history:

Coincidentally, you can find a code_swarm visualization for Rails and other projects by Ilya Grigorik. He points to Peter Burns’ fork on GitHub which has a much improved toolset for generating these types of visualizations.

I used the original repository which involves a lot more work. For RubyGems I did roughly the following:

1. Get a log: svn log -v > rubygems.log
2. Convert the log: python convert_logs.py -s rubygems.log -o rubygems.xml
3. Munge the XML to remove the CVS conversion commits and hide the renames from trunk/rubygems/ to trunk/
4. Run code_swarm: code_swarm rubygems.config
5. Encode PNGs to an MP4: ffmpeg -f image2 -b 1500 -r 24 -i frames/rubygems-%05d.png -sameq rubygems.mp4
6. Upload to Vimeo

I played around with the code_swarm configuration a bit and ended up with this config for code_swarm. My changes give a larger video with more lingering of files as they float around and bumps up font sizes for readability. For more active projects you may need to decrease FileLife and PersonLife. (Really, I’m not sure how they affect things.)