Twitter just recently launched a new Twitter Engineering blog, and to kick things off, one team member, Ben Sandofsky, decided to share a video he made representing Twitter’s development history. The video was made using Code Swarm, a software tool used to visualize data.
As Sandofsky notes, “it isn’t exactly scientific, but it still goes to show Twitter’s explosive growth mirrored in engineering.” More importantly, it looks awesome. You can see the shift in Twitter development from Jack Dorsey in the early days (2006) to Blaine Cook to Alex Payne to Twitter’s now large team of developers. Each team member is represented in the video by their Twitter avatar.
Watch it below. It’s mesmerizing.
Twitter Code Swarm from Ben Sandofsky on Vimeo.
Cool video. What’s the music?
Sounds like a song from a Cirque du Soliel show.
Pretty sure I saw a whale swimming in there.
Well done.
It looks like the vid is on a fractal on steroid. The background music, seems to be the ones you’re hearing from an epic-battle RPG Games.. Anyway, it was nicely made, provided you put some legend on the upper left of the vid — To give the viewers an idea of what are those ‘wisp’ looking things are doing.
Too bad, Twitter has a tendency to become saturated. Details: Details: http://bit.ly/twitter-1-billion-value-meltdown
I need some happy mushrooms to watch that.
LOL. Keep this video in your “mushroom queue” for when you have some.
I love visualization, but still this is not news.
agreed. and very rarely do commits reflect the amount of engineering gone into a project. fools. it looks rad, that is all.
I agree with Esahc, I need the “happy mushrooms” to watch it too because I don’t really get it, I mean, I get it, but it’s nothing to really write home about .. maybe 3d glasses and a blunt would do the trick..
I want the software that compiled the data into the video. That was very nice.
Haha I totally got booted from a project back in the day because Ben Sandofsky totally ran circles around me with the mad engineering skills…
Happy to see that he’s at Twitter now, good job dude
Made me smile to see Ev pop in an commit a couple files. How many 3rd time entrepreneurs stay up with technology? Nice.
that was a really cool video and I like the music too….if u go to Vimeo – the “Music is “Undercurrent” by Jami Sieber, licensed via Magnatune.” magnatune.com/artists/albums/sieber-lush/hifi_play – to play it, go to: http:/magnatune.com/artists/albums/sieber-lush/hifi_play (yes I downloaded it, very soothing when I’m working ♥)
A little more dramatic than watching coders doing there thing up and piling up in new cubicles…
Wow, crazy. My college roommate created Codeswarm. Cool to see him being referenced on TechCrunch.
We did this same thing for Artbabble.org in a blog post at http://imamuseum.org/blog
We used a different tool called gource http://code.google.com/p/gource/
Makes a neat video but only represents a small portion of the actual work that goes into a project.
Heres the link to the blog post if anyone is interested: http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2010/01/05/10000-commits/
Great – the best thing to come out of Twitter apart from twitter
simple wate of time, Now we know why twitter is still in red.
i thought it’s really amazing but the video happened to disappoint me.
That video is awesome, and the music match perfect.
Know what this highlights to me? Jack Dorsey got fired pretty early on. Why?
One thing that really annoys me about twitter is how the user ID profiles are made. It looks like someone squatted Kevin 001 all the way up into the thousands and it’s only going to get worse when it comes to obtaining a unique ID in the future.
Great video guys, a little over my head, but looked amazing!
This is incredible. You can learn a *huge* amount about Twitter’s development from this video. You can see who primarily worked on the backend vs. the frontend over time, different phases of splitting up large files and modules into smaller ones, the onboarding process of new developers, etc. That’s a lot of information for a 3 minute video.
twitter is based on a simple idea. not rocket science.
not worth a penny indeed.
this bubble will burst soon…
twitter suckers suck
By far the best representation of development I’ve ever seen.
Very nice data visualization! Thank you for the vid!
WOw, thats like the coolest thign I ever seen!
Jess
http://www.internet-anonymity.se.tc
Cool video. Made no sense at all. But cool video.
I didn’t see any yellow Scala bubbles… is my monitor not calibrated correctly or contrary to what I’ve read have there been no Scala file commits?
Commits visualised as a swarm showed up for the Python codebase yonks ago.
And isn’t that music pinched from Braid?
Yeah, I suck.