This is cool but using rectangles instead of circles would help this visualization. Circles waste real estate and not friendly to labels (e.g. curved text that is harder to read)
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!
Great idea & execution, I've definitely thought about building something similar and have tried Gource once before. However, I must add a +1 to the parent commenter re: rectangles. Circle packing is pretty, but a proper rectangular tree map interface gives you everything the circle map does with better labels, less wasted space, and less chance of a funky circle layout from the force/relaxing algorithm.
This would be great for a presentation where I'm trying to make our codebase look flashy and cool. But for actually getting work done, I'll take a tree map any day. Check out the mac app GrandPerspective if you haven't seen it - great use of tree maps for cleaning up hard drive space.
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!