WORK / CASE STUDY / Interactive systems
Constellation
A customizable, portable constellation map of public GitHub projects, designed to make a developer's work easier to explore.
01 / THE PROBLEM
What needed to be better?
A flat repository list can be difficult to scan and gives little context about how projects relate to one another.
Built for: Developers and people reviewing their public GitHub work.
02 / APPROACH
How the project works.
Read public repository metadata and present project relationships as a visual map.
Let visitors customize the layout, project selection, and appearance without requiring sign-in for public exploration.
Support portable SVG, PNG, interactive HTML, and embeddable output.
03 / ENGINEERING
Decisions and tradeoffs.
Key decisions
- Use browser-native HTML/CSS/SVG for presentation and a Rust/WASM engine for graph and layout computation.
- Explain why nodes appear and distinguish source metadata from calculations or user choices.
- Make the result portable rather than requiring the full Studio to display it.
Constraints acknowledged
- Visual relationships are an aid to exploration, not a ranking of developer skill.
- Repository metadata is only a partial view of work and can vary over time.
04 / EVIDENCE
What we can verify.
A usable visual presentation and export workflow for public GitHub projects. No adoption or performance figures are claimed.
- The repository README documents the Studio, CLI, GitHub Action, output formats, and explanation model.
- The source code, public Studio, and documentation are available for independent inspection.
Read the public code and documentation for details. The qualitative descriptions above are not performance measurements or third-party endorsements.
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