For the last few months, I've been entranced with data visualization. I'm convinced that if we take data and find creative ways to visualize it, we'll be able to optimize what produces that data, as well as improve the ways we collect (and thusly visualize) that data.

One of the things I've wanted to do is hack a little more on bzr-stats, which is a a Bazaar plugin for generating statistics. I used the current trunk of bzr-stats as the groundwork for creating a graph, but the more I think about what I want to do, the more I'm realizing that I probably need to write my own plugin, as I don't think bzr-stats is going to take me where I want to go, and already has a set direction. I'll probably just fork bzr-stats into another project.

Regardless, I did a little prototype hacking tonight, and created a pie graph of all committers to a given project, and attached their percentages. The code is ugly, and there are lots of cases I don't yet deal with. For instance, if a user only has one revision, it's still displayed. It'd be nice to set a percentage threshold where you get lumped into an "Other" category, so as not to clutter up the chart.

As I get more time, I think it would be cool to see the frequency of commits over time, the various types of contributions (bzr-stats kinda does this), and other types of trend tracking. If nothing else, it'll be cool to see how contributions pick up when Launchpad is open sourced. If you're interested in seeing the crummy prototype code, the branch is here.

Update: For those interested, I generated a pie chart for bzr.dev that can be found right here