The Great Egg Race

At SPA this year, we are setting the attendees a challenge. We'd like people to build something during the conference. Form a team and show off your development skills, perhaps using a new technique you learned at the conference, or showing everyone the benefits of the One True Way (whichever way you think that is). What can you create in a relatively short amount of time? Throughout the conference there are sessions set aside for people to work on their project, plus of course there's the hallway, the coffee breaks, and the bar... At the end of the conference we'll have a showcase where people can present what they've done, and there will be a prize for the best.

The Challenge

This challenge was inspired by a friend of SPA, Michael Feathers. In recent times, Michael has been developing ideas on "Refactoring in the 4th Dimension" - by which he means extracting information about changes in a codebase over time by mining information in the source code repository.

Michael has some tools that extract data from a Git repository about each commit, and write these into a csv file for easier manipulation. He also has some Ruby code that can be used to load and manipulate the data.

We will give you the data files, and access to Michael's Ruby code which you may like to use, or not.

The main point of the challenge is that we would like you to create interesting visualisations of this data. Can you combine a bit of data processing with a slick way of presenting it to create something cool and insightful? Can you find out anything interesting about the codebase using your visualisation?

Resources:

* A zip of Michael Feathers' code, including a couple of csv files of data
 - active_merchant.csv
 - diaspora.csv (this is the largest)
 - eventmachine.csv
 - paperclip.csv
* Some of Michael's slides showing how to use his library
 - first of all load 'repo-depot.rb', then load some events and you can try the examples from the slides to give you some ideas
* The same code on github: https://github.com/michaelfeathers/repodepot-ruby

