A great starter project: a config file generator for Gource

I use a really cool tool called Gource to generate mesmerising visualisations of the commit log of code repositories I am involved with. Here's the blurb from the website that describes what it does:

Software projects are displayed by Gource as an animated tree with the root directory of the project at its centre. Directories appear as branches with files as leaves. Developers can be seen working on the tree at the times they contributed to the project.

I am helping a friend getting started with professional coding and I was looking for a project that is simple enough, useful and with potential for future challenges. Gource has a long list of options and creating a command line for it or a config file can be quite tedious. So thought an online tool that provides people a web graphical interface to generate this command line or config file could be a really interesting project and would constitute a great first open source project as well.

Think about it. It could be as simple as first as a bunch of HTML controls that generate a text in a text area. The user would then use clipboard copy. Then after that, we could introduce a concept of downloading to a file. And then it can be made more sophisticated by adding an interactive visualisation of how the controls would impact the Gource interface. The ultimate complication would be to introduce the concept of projects that can be stored online and attached to a user a profile. Then a great followup project would be to re-implement the same tool as a desktop application.

There is a great tradition of creating GUIs for complicated command line tools. For example qwinff offers a simplified interface to ffmpeg.

The quickest way to work on this project at first would be to use something like a static page on github. My friend could use codespaces as their dev environment. So this would double up as a github tutorial as well. Then as their app grows in complexity, this could become a great gateway to netlify and other cool app deployment platforms.

So I have high hope that this project is going to be a fertile ground for learning how to code. Starting from the simplest thing possible, and growing slowly to a full blown modern app. In the end, my friend would have something they could brag about and that could definitely be useful for a bunch of people. At the time of this write-up the Gource github repo has received 8.3k stars 🌟 - not bad for a niche tool!