The Atomic Human

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Writing the Atomic Human

Sometimes I’m asked “How long did it take you to write?” The answer is now visualised below.

Visualisation of the writing process using the gource tool and the repositories where the book was written.

The visualisation tool uses a half second per day, so now I can finally say that the material was edited on around 550 days across eight years with the initial repository created on GitHub on 21st May 2015.

It’s created using the gource source code visualisation tool. Because the book was initially written in one repository, before moving it to another, the first thing I do is combine the logs of the repositories.

gource --output-custom-log log1.txt ~/riseofthealgorithm/riseofthealgorithm.github.io
gource --output-custom-log log2.txt ~/lawrennd/the-atomic-human
cat log1.txt log2.txt | sort -n > combinedlog.txt

Then gource is used to visualise the result which is uploaded to YouTube.

gource combinedlog.txt \
    --seconds-per-day 0.5 \
    -1280x720 \
    --auto-skip-seconds .3 \
    --multi-sampling \
    --stop-at-end \
    --key \
    --highlight-users \
    --file-idle-time 1500 \
    --background-colour 000000 \
    --font-size 25 \
    --title "The Atomic Human" \
    --user-image-dir .git/avatar \
    --user-scale 6.0 \
    --user-font-size 30 \
    -e 2.5 \
    --output-framerate 60 \
    --output-ppm-stream - \
    | ffmpeg -y -f image2pipe \
        -framerate 60 \
        -i - \
        -c:v libx264 \
        -preset medium \
        -pix_fmt yuv420p \
        -crf 18 \
        -movflags +faststart \
        atomic_human_visualization.mp4