How Software Development Should Look

Coding always looks awesome in sci-fi. Ed in Cowboy Bebop manipulates 8-bit fish to chomp through security interlocks. Ghost in the Shell's Major Kusanagi dives through neon glyphs as she infiltrates subsystems. It's always much cooler than the reality of pasty engineers staring at walls of text. Thanks to a crazy algorithm called Gource, we can see what real software projects would look like in glorious sci-fi-o-vision.

This video, for Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup (an excellent free-to-play turn-based dungeon crawl [surprise!] that you should totally check out), says it all. The Gource process takes the real development logs from the project's version control database and creates a visual video timeline. For sci-fi geeks like me, watching this abstract representation of software development is fascinating.

It's too bad that real coding takes years of study and practice and a dedication that I typically reserve for conquering the world 4X-style.