[azinman2]

What I think is interesting about this is that they weren't able to easily measure or find using existing tools these hotspots -- they needed a combination of visualization and data munging to do so.

Visualization is an often overlooked tool in CS -- for example IDEs do little to zero visualization... only LightTable is starting to break out of the traditional text document. It also shows that depending on the problem visualization & data can be morphed and stretched to provide new insights when others might have walked away.

So why isn't this something that's a part of job interviewing or a bigger part of our normal toolbox as engineers?

[sdesol]

> Visualization is an often overlooked tool in CS

It's often overlooked, because generating meaningful data, that can provide visual insight, is usually very difficult. Right now I'm working on a blog post that goes over how you can use motion bubble charts to track code changes and I use GitLab as an example. You can find a draft of the blog at:

http://gitsense.github.io/blog/motion-bubble-charts.html

Note the blog post is still in DRAFT state, so there are broken links and grammatical errors and what not.

Capturing meaningful data at the Enterprise scale, requires a lot of effort. There is a reason why I ended up creating my own real-time process monitoring system:

http://gitsense.github.io/blog/realtime-process-monitoring.h...

What I'm ultimately hoping to do with the metrics, is create a new way to visual Git logs and improve how we approach complex code reviews and diffs.