Checkin history

Inspired by the incredible recent blog post from Stephen Wolfram, and the subsequent release of some of the code used for his plots, I took some time to plot out every code checkin made to my product’s main source code branch.  Our product has been around in some form or another for a long time, so there is a nice long history to look at.

Here’s the plot of all 152,000 checkins:

Some trends immediately pop out: Obvious “work hours,” a break around the winter holidays, a faint break during lunch time.  There are surges and falloffs related to our past release dates.  The horizontal lines are due to automated checkins from our build system, updating the version number, for example, each day at exactly the same time.  I can’t say I really understand the seemingly vertical lines, maybe someone was just really productive?  There is increasing activity in the wee hours due to various international teams contributing in recent years.

Note that this is only our main branch - a ton of additional churn happens in various sub-branches, which are then integrated back into main when the project is complete.  None of that work is shown here.

So where do I fit in?  Here’s the same plot, with checkins from yours truly in blue:

Yes, I remember that one 3AM checkin…