Your Code as a Crime Scene

Grow Your Mental Maps

Remember how we discussed geographical offender profiling back in ​Learn Geographical Profiling of Crimes​? We built our hotspot analyses based on the idea that just as we spot patterns in the movement of criminals, our version-control data lets us identify patterns in the changes we make to the codebase. What I didn’t mention back then is that the movement of offenders is constrained by a concept called mental maps.

A mental map is our subjective view of a specific geographic area. Our mental maps deviate from how a real map would look. For example, geographical hindrances such as highways and rivers often constrain and skew our perception of an area. In the small town where I grew up, it took me years to venture across ...