Two interesting code survey tool

2023-04-21

What the tools

Here are the two tools i'm talking about:

Why is it interesting?

Because this a unique way of thinking about code. It is also a helpful way for me to understand code.

I always wanted to make contribution to open source project, but often fail to do so due to the complexity of the code base. As beginner I often feel stuck and don't know where to begin. Most of the "tutorials" wil just tell you to "start from checking typos", which doesn't really help at all.

These two tools will help me understand the landscape of open source project of a certain language and give me an overview of the structure of the code.

So have you used it? What's you feedback?

So far i've using it to read the codebase for various open source projects. As person who want to get in the on the action, this ease my way in undertanding what the heck is going on.

As an example, here the visulization of one of the project i'm interested in(github):

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Here's another one for twitter's algorithm:

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It's from this visulization that i learned that twitter used Rust on one of it's services, which motivates me to learn more about the language. It seems that a lot of companies have been adopting Rust.

So to explore rust, we can also go use the muti-repo visulization tool:

So..

I hope i can use these tools more often in the future. With a easier way of reading code, I'll be way more motivated to try to write and contirbute code to open sources projects as well.