The spark
A group project I poured everything into came back graded too low. The professor wasn’t budging. So I wrote Python to do the talking: commit counts broken down by type, because one teammate had been duplicating the entire project to inflate his contribution graph. I CC’d the professor’s boss. Then his boss’s boss. Each message had hand-coded visualisations attached.
The grade went from a B+ to an A.
Building it properly
While writing those scripts, I realised there wasn’t a clean tool for this. Around then I’d been getting into beautifully made Mac apps like Alcove, and I wanted something with that same care. So I learned SwiftUI from scratch and built Whodunnit: filterable contribution views, calendar selection, colour-coded contributors, commit dashboards, all scoped to any repo on your machine.
I never released it. Only I ever used it. It still lives on my laptop.
What it became
Whodunnit taught me that this data is genuinely useful and that the tools for visualising it are thin on the ground. A while later that same instinct, with the attitude turned down, became whowrote.dev.
Same root, kinder vibe.