Viz

FAQ

Why Viz?

Viewing raw stats and tables only tell you part of a story.

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Viz helps tell the rest of the story with interactive visualizations that are continually updated.

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How Do We Help or Stay Up-To-Date With the Evolution of Viz?

Viz is just getting started. Help spread the word!

Contributions and feedback are welcome.

Feel free to follow, star, fork, and check back for updates.

How Do We Navigate Viz?

Each dashboard within Viz offers different levels of interactivity. Try:

  • Interacting with the filters.
  • Hovering over elements to view tooltip info.
  • Clicking elements to highlight or filter.

You can change the activate dashboard through the following control:

Can We Viz Offline?

Yes, you'll need the free Reader. Download and run the latest Viz Workbook. This allows you to interact with a local copy--you'll need to download the latest workbook as updates are continually pushed.

Depending on your setup, you'll likely see improved performance running Viz locally.

Why Does the Online Viz Reset After Several Minutes of Inactivity?

Sessions timeout after some inactivity. For more details, view this post from the Tableau Forums.

Why Isn't the Online Interactive Viz Loading for Me?

The visualization hosting service might be having issues. Check the status.

You can also run Viz offline.

Can We See Visualizations in JavaScript, Python, R or ...?

Please check out the following ticket.

Community visualizations:

What Data Is Tracked?

Although GitHub Trending is a great tool to discover up-and-coming projects, it only allows you to review up to one month of data. Third-party sites often show all-time stats that are relatively static, as they are dominated by well-established repos.

Viz is meant to supplement existing solutions by filtering only on the newest, most popular repos created within a specific timeframe.

For example, Viz 2016 will only track repos created within the year 2016.

Can We See Stats for Time Ranges Other Than 2016?

Viz currently provides stats for 2016, 2015, and rolling 1-, 3-, and 6-months.

Can We See Stats for 'Older' Repos?

In the future, Viz can be extended to track repos regardless of creation date. Feedback on this ticket is welcome.

How Do You Mine Data?

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Mining data directly from GitHub, Viz is powered by the GitHub API and leverages the following:

In the future, Google BigQuery along with GitHub Archive could also supplement the GitHub API.

*Interested in visualizations with JavaScript, Python, R, or ...? Check out the following ticket.

Where Do We Find the Data?

When Did You Mine the 2016 Data?

The Viz 2016 stats were mined on January 1, 2017, between 00:00 to 01:00 PDT and include all repos created in the year 2016. The data is preserved here.

Why Are My 2016 Manual Search Results Different From Viz 2016?

With GitHub Search, you can manually run queries similar to what you would get from the GitHub API.

To view the most-starred JavaScript repos created in 2016, run the following query:

created:2016-01-01..2016-12-31 stars:>=100 language:javascript

To check stats for a user's or an org's repos that were created in 2016, run:

created:2016-01-01..2016-12-31 stars:>=100 user:user_name

Star counts from the searches above will show data up to the time you performed the search.

Why Restrict Search Results to stars:>=100 or stars:>=500 for Viz 2016?

Only repos with stars:>=100 are tracked to help filter GitHub's rapidly growing 49+ million repositories and to keep within the GitHub API rate limits.

Some visualizations with additional data such as pull requests, issues, contributors, and commits filter repos with stars:>=500

Viz 6-, 3-, and 1-month might loosen this restriction as there should be less repos to analyze. Google BigQuery along with GitHub Archive could also supplement the GitHub API.

Why Stars and Forks?

Viz provides stats for repos, users, and orgs by stars (and in many cases, forks). Stars and forks are not perfect metrics, yet they are simple and fairly effective measures of interest. For a more detailed discussion on measuring repo popularity, check out "On the Popularity of GitHub Applications: A Preliminary Note" which concludes:

The number of stars of a system tends to correlate not only with the number of forks, but also with its effective usage by other client applications, which reinforces the importance of stars as a real measure of a system’s popularity.

New Support for Additional Metrics

Update: Viz now includes additional data such as pull requests, issues, contributors, and commits.

How Are Stats for Users and Orgs Calculated?

To provide stats for users and orgs, Viz groups stars and forks by user or org. Note the stars:>=100 restriction still applies.

What Languages Are Tracked?

Viz tracks the most popular languages on GitHub plus the Unknown language option. Repo languages are identified by github/linguist.

Missing a popular language below? Feel free to file a request.

languages = [
    'JavaScript',
    'Java',
    'Objective-C',
    'Python',
    'Swift',
    'Go',
    'PHP',
    'C++',
    'C',
    'CSS',
    'HTML',
    'Ruby',
    'C#',
    'Shell',
    'Scala',
    'Clojure',
    'CoffeeScript',
    'Lua',
    'Haskell',
    'VimL',
    'R',
    'Perl',
    'Julia',
    'Unknown',
    'Overall',
]

Is Viz Affiliated With GitHub?

No, Viz is not affiliated with GitHub.

Viz is a community project by the GitHub community, for the GitHub community.

How Do We Contribute?

Please review the Contributing Guidelines for details on how to:

  • Submit issues
  • Submit pull requests

Check out the issue tracker.

How Do We Contact You?

Feel free to contact me to discuss any issues, questions, or comments.

You can also file a ticket on the issue tracker.

What Is the License for Viz?

Copyright 2016 Donne Martin

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.