I can't be the only one who has been getting these videos of people who have built something that looks like a video game to represent their AI agents.

I know that, in practice, it doesn't really do anything more than give you a visual representation of what's happening, but it's kind of cool to see, and it's definitely entertaining.

That said, I do see a use case for this sort of approach. One that may actually solve something that most developers struggle with.

I'm calling my little idea, my proposed solution, The Butter Factory.

Butter?

Well, since our little group of bandits is called Mantequilla Soft, it only makes sense, right?

Anyways, the point is that soon, possibly by the time you read this, Snapie.io and maybe some of our other projects will be able to render a graphical representation of our work week.

The Butter Factory, summed up, is a little app that reads all the activity happening in our GitHub organization and tells you, in a cool retro game-like way, where our efforts went during the week.

The little characters are clickable, so you can see who is forging the nuts and bolts, but the log history is also accurate and linked to the real activity happening in our repos.

Again, I know this isn't needed. In the sense that without it, we would probably do just fine.

But if there is one thing that always happens with open source and voluntary work, it's that people forget that it's still work, even when it's voluntary.

And I think there's something useful about making that work visible.

You can look at a GitHub repository and see commits, pull requests, issues and all that wonderful developer gobbledygook.

Or...

You can look at a little dude standing in a factory, hammering away at a giant pile of nuts, and immediately understand:

Oh. These idiots have been busy.

Nuff said.

MenO