Codex Stellarum

Your GitHub history, printed as a vintage star atlas

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Hello Product Hunt, I am Enrico, and I make Codex Stellarum in London. It began with a present. A friend had spent two years teaching herself to code in the evenings and at weekends, and had just started her first job as a developer. We wanted to give her something that marked it. The contribution posters we found were well made, but held up against a living room wall they looked like a page from a website. So we drew her history by hand as a star atlas: one star for every day she had worked, large on the busy days, faint on the quiet ones. Her boyfriend, who had never heard of GitHub, saw it leaning against the wall and asked one thing: "Where are we hanging that?" That question is the whole product. Most of what developers build disappears into production. Years of work, and nothing to hold. I wanted an object a non-developer would call beautiful before knowing what it was, and a developer would look at twice and say "wait, those are my commits". How it grew: - It started as a joke that worked beautifully on a hundred commits. Then I tried Linus Torvalds, twenty years of history, and the renderer fell over. Most of the work since has been teaching it to survive real accounts. - One renderer, several projections: Chronicle, Planisphere, Helix and Rosette for commits, and Horizon for a repository's stars. Four themes, from Observatory gold on navy to Parchment ink. - Honest numbers only. When a repository has more stargazers than we can fetch, we sample, and the chart says so rather than inventing a total. - The canvas you see in the browser is the one that gets printed. A headless browser redraws it at full resolution and it goes to the print lab nearest to you, on 200gsm archival matte paper, framed in solid wood if you like. - New this week: gift cards. Most people buying for a developer do not know their GitHub username, and now they do not need to. The card is priced like the prints themselves, arrives by email on the day you choose, even Christmas morning, and they chart their own sky. Try your own name, or a repository you love. It is free and needs no account. I would like to know which layout you would hang. Look at the quiet months too; they are part of the story. Enrico