wattenberger

I hadn't seen it until today - looks like a useful product!

Spot on! It's a space I've been wanting to explore, and so have been tinkering with it this last week while we're in between larger projects. I definitely don't see it being a product in it's current gotten, but wanted to share the exploration! Although I will say that the more I've been visualizing different repos, the more convinced I am that it's more useful than is easy to convey.

oh no! My best guess would be that there are many element-heavy SVGs on the page. I was hoping for better performance, since the files will almost definitely be smaller than large raster images, but there are likely older browsers that have trouble with that. I'll look into it, thanks for the report!

There are definitely many trade-offs with using a circle pack layout - I snuck a bit of the reasoning into the collapsed section halfway through the write-up! Overall, this layout worked best for me, with the nesting feeling very natural and the circles feeling very "atomic".

But big picture, this write-up isn't tied to the current visualization! It's more focused on exploring _how_ a visual representation could help our understanding of codebases. There are tons of jumping off points, including different vizes!

Hmm, it should be loading! What OS/browser are you on?

We always look at our code in a file/folder list - I explored an alternative way to view codebases, showing a bird's-eye-view of its structure. This write-up walks through the motivations, ways to use the visualization, and potential future directions (there are many!).

There's also an interactive tool to check out your own repos and a GitHub Action if you want to integrate a diagram into a README.

I also added it after your first comment so might have snuck it by you ;) I'm curious what it is that you're seeing, if you have the chance to leave an image!

interesting! I'm seeing them grouped in the middle. It's a tricky layout, using d3.js's circle packing algorithm, then recursively using a force layout to relax each folder's contents.

ah shoot, thanks for the updated link!