Final project for the Information Visualization course at IST. On this project we focus on visualizing programmer communities using data from the popular Q&A website StackOverflow.com.

Programmer communities are a dynamical process, communities emerge around certain technologies, they might follow a period of stagnation and eventually die out or alternatively might show strong signs of activity, sometimes even after a long time the programming language originally came about. One of the tasks that our application has to support is to display the evolution of programming languages throughout time, this should allow us to get a detailed view for each community on how it has evolved throughout the years. We should be able to detect sudden spikes of interest in a language, or even detect languages that have just recently come out of obscurity.

Another task our visualization should support is to detect interactions among communities, communities do not exist on its own and more often than not they intersect. A programming community can be defined based on its user base, meaning the users that engage on that community on a regular basis, finding intersections among communities therefore becomes finding the shared user base, or in other words finding the users that engage in both communities on a regular basis. Our visualization should be able to answer questions of the type: What other programming languages or frameworks does a JavaScript developer typically know how to use? Is a Python developer more likely to engage on the PHP community or on the Java community?

A live demo of the project can be found at: https://luispsantos.github.io/projects/stackoverflow-visualization/