Ward included Graphviz in a short list of tools he has reached for over and over. We found particular inspiration from two examples: El Dorado and Exploratory Parsing.
I learned that graphviz had been ported to run in a web browser. I used that as an excuse to learn something about modern HTML5 web components. I combined that exercise with two other areas of interest: wiki on dat and on glitch.com. Working with browser technology is familiar terrain. DAT and Glitch and Web Components were frontiers. I explored.
Almost as soon as I'd built the wiki plugin, Ward took an interest in building a domain-specific language (DSL) for constructing diagrams from links between federated wiki pages. Graphviz is a tool he's returned to throughout his career and now it is conveniently plugged into wiki. The results are surprising regardless of the law of fluency.
Return to Reflections on Graphviz Plugin
I've been reflecting recently as to how well the unix shell has held up over time. What else have I used over and over?
I've mostly used the dot component of the suite of graph rendering programs.
Here we collect various mentions of the work we've done observing software through the metadata produced throughout its creation and operation.
See AboutUs Getting Started blog post announcing the open-sourcing of this technology. github 