Nice visuals from software project

November 3, 2011 5:04 PM

I'm looking for a way to generate something aesthetically pleasing from a somewhat successful software project I'm involved in, with an eye to giving it as a gift to the project manager.

Source data I can think of is a SVN repository with ~10000 commits, a repository of a few thousand data objects and connections between them, and job logs also containing a few thousand entries over the last couple of years.

I'm aware of codeswarm and the Mapping the Internet people. Do you know of any other awesome tools or have ideas how to create beautiful artifacts from timeline/graph data? I have ample computing resources and tech skills at my disposal, but probably not large sums of money.

Anonymous because I don't want to spoil it in case the addressee surprisingly reads the green as well.

posted by anonymous to computers & internet (6 answers total)

There's gource, similar to code_swarm.
posted by aeighty at 5:25 PM on November 3, 2011

d3
posted by rhizome at 5:40 PM on November 3, 2011

DAVILA is a "relational database schema visualization and annotation tool", utility depending on the kind of software project on which you were working.
posted by lillygog at 6:10 PM on November 3, 2011

If you're up for building something from scratch, processing is pretty great.
posted by lucidium at 6:29 PM on November 3, 2011

Source code posters could be an option if your project has a nice logo.
posted by reynaert at 8:17 PM on November 3, 2011

You could go another direction and use the CMU pronunciation dictionary to pull out rhyming couplets from the commit messages. Give the project manager a chapbook of SVN sonnets!
posted by aparrish at 9:22 PM on November 3, 2011