Recently, we rolled out a piece of software to our production systems where I work. It’s been the largest project on which I’ve worked and it’s also taken the longest. There have been a lot of ups and downs with creating this software, as there are with any software you write.
As with anything you create (you creative types know what I’m talking about) you look back and see things you could have done differently. All in all though, I’m extremely proud of how our system has turned out. The team has changed (literally) over the course of this application. The architecture though, which I had a hand in coming up with, I’m happy to say has held together for everyone that’s been involved.
That seems like a good thing to me.
So to celebrate the release of our product, I created a movie to show our development of it.
(Geek speak ahead. If you’d rather just watch the movie and skip the tech talk, just push play there pardner).
About a year ago, I discovered a program called gource. Gource works natively against a Git repository but there is a converter utility to allow SVN (which we used for our project) to be used as well.
Essentially this application called gource, runs through your log files of your rep and applies an animation to them. You have full-control over the look and feel of the animation, the length of it, the character names, etc.
After the raw animation was completed, I simply imported the file into Windows Movie Maker, added some music, some credits and presto-chango!, I had myself a bonafide movie.
I highly recommend gource as well – if you use Git or SVN. It’s a very great way to make some ‘home movies’ of your development team’s work!
It’s also a great way for the team to get together after a project and just recap, maybe have some pizza (like our boss bought for us) and sit and watch your own movie. I even sent our movie to the CEO of our company and got a personal thank you (both email and in person). Not a bad thing at all, right?
So the following movie is about a year and half of development effort that you can watch in 15 minutes, set to some of the most epic music ever. Enjoy!
If you like this and would like me to post a quick tut on how I put my video together, leave a comment and let me know! I’ll be happy to write one up!