project wrap up:

if the screen captures i posted here didn't make much sense to you, believe it or not, that was actually the whole point of my project. and by that i mean that the goal was to build something tailor made for me to better understand an algorithm i'm working on. and without knowledge of that algorithm, the data just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

i wanted to figure out what it would take to create a custom visualization and how that process could be streamlined. because i think custom algorithm visualizations are a huge thing we're missing out on, not only for debugging, but also for internal developer documentation. some things are just much easier to understand with an interactive visual.

but while it's certainly nice to have visualizations, there's a question of whether they make "economic sense" to create. for example, if you spend 6 hours to build a visualization, which then allows you to fix a bug in 1 hour, and without the visualization it would have taken you 5 hours to fix the issue, then you saved -2 hours. in other words, you lost time. though there is a potential argument to be made that the tool may pay more dividends in the future, when you or some other dev comes back to the algorithm. then again, since the tool is tied closely to the implementation, there are also additional future costs for maintenance to be considered.

in practice, it took me around 10 hours to build the tool (excluding project setup time), and i spent around 7.5 hours using the tool to debug issues. if we exclude potential future time savings or costs (and points for "i just like doing this sort of thing"), then the tool would have had to save me at least 10 hours of debugging time. while it did certainly accelerate debugging significantly, i think that the savings are well below 10 hours, maybe around 2-3 hours. if we then also factor project setup time back in, i think we may have some anecdotal evidence for why "building custom visualizations" is just not a thing we do, unless we really need it.

my goal is now to bring down the time it takes to create such visualizations to under 2 hours and ideally closer to 30 minutes.