“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” — Epictetus

Again. Last day of my arbitrarily self imposed three post a month goal. I had some thoughts, Then I wrote down the beginning of the thoughts. And then I went and did something else.

lol at that fucking modus operandi.

I’ve kept making progress on my Day One JSON Exporter Converter. That’s a mouthful. So I’m gonna call it Jexto.

Cuz I got the domain jex.to. Also because it’s a journal exporter. It’s exporting the export to the file format that I want. Also because there really isn’t much usage of the characters j, e, x, t, and o grouped together from left to right.

I’ve been hyper focused on that for pretty much the month. Which has yielded something that’s damn close to useable.

I’ve got this thing extracting the journal entry metadata. As well as pulling quoted JSON out of JSON . It then reassembles the journal entry in a manner that is, and has been at times, well-formed enough to pass most of the relevant tests that markdown-cli2 performs.

As usual, I’d planned on writing something else. That didn’t happen. lol again.

The other night I was thinking about how I can possibly visualize my Git commit history over time.

I’ve been using gitwatch to make sure that just about every time I hit “Save” the changes are committed to my repo.

This has yielded, as of this moment, 7,154 commits. Which is what made me think that visualizing that kinda stuff over time might be interesting. So I searched for something, and found gource .

Gource is badass. I am absolutely loving what it can do.

I installed it and ran it against my Jexto repo. The following video shows what about 30 days of hyper-focusing on this thing has yielded.

Visualizing 1 Month Of Day One Journal JSON Export Conversion Tool Development

Seeing that visualized makes me feel pretty good.

When I do shit like this it can be absolutely maddening at times when there’s some stupid self-imposed logic error that you’re not finding. That’s breaking shit.

That you already solved somewhere else but forgot. Because there’s so much conditional logic required to make this thing process things the way I want.

I found this interesting, so I decided to play around with gource on the Git repositories that I work with in my current role. Which have vastly more contributions to more repositories than my little test.

Currently, I’ve got source code commits from 2011. And it’s only a slim portion of all the things.

That generated the below.

Visualizing 12 Years Of DevOps Development

That made me feel pretty good too when I realized what it was showing.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m doing nothing.

And then I feel kinda guilty because I feel like I’m getting paid really well to do nothing. But, seeing that visualization made me realize that tracking all that shit is the reason that I get paid well.

That visual shows all the people that contributed to the code required to support a platform that fan handle over 400,000 simultaneous user sessions.

Each of the clusters of dots are files. And each time a little person zaps a file they’ve modified the file.

I’ve found that as I find myself in more senior engineering roles that at first I’m one of those little characters flying around contributing to all the things, and then I slowly contribute less to the specific dots.

But, rather than contributing to those files I’m helping to create that cluster of files.

And each “cluster of files” is some sort of aspect of the infrastructure that is vital to supporting our platform.

I’m more familiar with the balls than the branches.

This is a questionable place to be in given the seniority of my current role. I gotta know how the branches are growing in order to make sure they form the balls.

Which is what contributes to a mean sense of imposter syndrome. As well as the knowledge that at some point my job will be replaced by some stupid AI.

I am pretty pleased that I’m writing about balls though. Which, in this case, are little visual metaphors for files. Not actual balls.

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