code-maat VS code-compass

Get a copy of "Your code as a crime scene", then check out two GitHub repos

https://github.com/adamtornhill/code-maat

https://github.com/smontanari/code-forensics

He also wrote Your Code as a Crime Scene and authored the open source tool, Code Maat. I've found both extremely useful in my current job where I took over a code base with immense technical debt.

https://github.com/adamtornhill/code-maat

It's not as neat as that unfortunately. You use this to extract different data from the version control history: https://github.com/adamtornhill/code-maat

Then visualize it however. I have some d3 scripts that came with the book that I've modified and you can track down somewhere on github I'm pretty sure. I mostly use those for demoing it to devs unfamiliar with the techniques though, since it looks cool and is immediately obvious what it's for.

For serious use I dump it into sqlite and use a mix of different scripts and techniques to figure it out. It's been kind of a language playground for me over the years so is in a lot of different languages and is "learning code" in most of them. Cleaning them up and sharing is one of those "maybe some day" things though.

After searching a bit more, it seems like https://github.com/adamtornhill/code-maat is a great tool

The tool code-complexity is closely coupled to JavaScript and TypeScript-based codebases. For other languages like Java, C#, Python, or PHP there are other tools, but one tool that is generic and works for most of the codebases is code-maat. It is a tool created by the author of the book mentioned in the chapter before.

https://github.com/adamtornhill/code-maat#Usage

I'm trying to install code-compass but I'm finding problems to copy scripts/ and pages/, doing this puts all the files on the same level with all *.el files, here is the recipe:

Okay, I had it on my GitHub stars, is https://github.com/ag91/code-compass

The idea is to create custom tools to understand what you (in the sense of your past self and your ancestors) have created so far. We need to stop to reinvent the wheel: tons of people before us were smarter and we need to be able to understand and retrieve what they did.

Since there is a lot of useful information around us, we just need to extract meaning from it in better ways (for example, I mention climate change in the blog, because this goes further than just code in my opinion).

In this blog I show how I could visualize my interests (the notes I take). This showcases how I could make a tool on the fly (still a bit too expensive for my tastes, working on that). With such an infrastructure I can easily go into code bases and see patterns via visualizations. Potentially I could even apply refactorings from pictures (since I could run code in my editor clicking an HTML file).

If you missed it, my previous work on code-compass (https://github.com/ag91/code-compass) is just the first draft of what I have in mind.

Hey, if you like that and by any chance you use Emacs you may want to check out my project as well: https://github.com/ag91/code-compass