I built Commit Canvas because I wanted to see the story hidden inside the work.
Developer. Builder of small, sharp tools. Believer that the best developer products feel like they were made by someone who actually uses them.
GitHub tells you what changed.
Commit Canvas tells you what happened.
Developers spend years building things. Then GitHub reduces all of it to a contribution grid and a commit count — metadata about the work, with the work's meaning stripped out.
But the history is all still there. The 2 AM fix that saved a launch. The month of silence after a release. The burst when the idea finally clicked. The one contributor who never stopped showing up. A git repository is one of the most honest datasets a developer will ever produce — and almost nobody ever sees it.
So I built a tool that reads it properly and paints it: build → git history → story → proof of work.
From one animated page to a real product.
The first version
Commit Canvas started as a single question: what if git log could be rendered like a film? v1 was a Python CLI that produced one animated HTML page — a title reveal, a timeline, a certificate. It worked. People smiled at their own commit history.
The honest audit
Auditing v1 was humbling in the way good audits are. The "zero-dependency" claim was false (the generator imported a template engine). Commit messages containing | silently corrupted the parser. Merge commits were thrown away entirely. The heatmap anchored to today, so old repos rendered an empty grid. The story engine oversold thin evidence.
The rebuild
v2 became a proper engine: one pass over the entire history, merges kept, real file and line tracking, deterministic chapters that only claim what the timestamps prove — plus a time machine, a fingerprint, a roast mode, and exports that all run locally. Every narrative line traces to a number.
v2.0 · single-pass analyzer · ~2s for 30k commitsWhat I learned
That "it works" and "it's honest" are different products. That the most emotional data a developer owns is their own history. And that a privacy-first, offline-first tool doesn't have to look like it was designed in a terminal.
still building in publicDeveloper tools. Beautiful software. Open source.
Storytelling through data, products that respect their users, and building in public — you can watch all of it happen in the repository history, which is exactly the point of this tool.
Find me where developers write.
Straight from my GitHub, live.
Public repositories only — fetched from the GitHub API right now, in your browser. If the API is unreachable, nothing is invented.
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