Each commiter (called a “member”) is given an id and random color. They start at the center of the world (a 2d circle) whenever they make their first commit.

Time is based on the commit history. Take a commit, check which files have been changed. Move the member who created the commit towards those files.

(1) How far should be their step? A fixed step size? A step size according to the number of changed lines?

(2) Where are the files located in this world? They so far existing ones can be evenly distributed in a square grid. Or they can switch places randomly as the world moves.

(3) How fast should the world rotate, and how fast should files change places?

There is no perfect answer for those and many other questions. They all became parameters to the project and explorations were made.

For p5.js and Processing4 you can watch as some specific commiters dig deeper in specific areas, while less hardcore ones move around more often.

The world and its rotation is the visual materialization of the project’s as our world while we are working on it. A 3d analogous visualization was losing too much information hidden on the other side of the sphere and therefore rejected as a good choice so far to represent this world.

Github: https://github.com/guilhermesilveira/the-process-trail