In addition to the two dimensions of space, and the overlay of geopolitical boundaries, this image shows sea-level pressure, temperature, and the vector of wind speed and direction. And it's just plain pretty to look at, too. I'd love to have a job that involved looking at pictures like that all day.
What would the software equivalent be, I wonder? Could I combine profiler data with a dynamic class diagram from UML? What if I overlaid a metric of function complexity on top of that?
The visualization tools for software are pretty weak, when you consider that all the information is already in the computer (we don't need weather satellites to get our data). It might be because software is an abstraction that doesn't easily lend itself to a 2-D layout like weather data does, but I think it might also be that software engineers are by nature less visually oriented. I think I'm more of a visual thinker than most, but not all, of the developers I've worked with. I'm not really comfortable with something until I can draw a picture of it.
2 comments:
I saw your comment on the Cliff Mass blog about your basement. I was wondering which service you used since you seem satisfied with the service. I've been shopping around for a while and find the field rather confusing!
I would have mentioned it on Cliff's blog but it seemed wrong to plug a commercial service on someone else's blog. We used Rite-Way Waterproofing. I would certainly recommend them; they did what they said they would do, when they said they would do it, for the (very reasonable) amount they said they would charge, and I'm happy with the quality of the work and with the results. It was just a few thousand dollars - if I'd known it was that cheap I would have done it ten years ago.
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