Ward included Graphviz in a short list of tools he reaches for again and again. We were inspired by two examples in particular: El Dorado and Exploratory Parsing.
Eric Dobbs learned that Graphviz had been ported to run in a web browser. He took that as an opportunity to learn about modern HTML5 web components. He combined this exercise with two other areas of interest: wiki on dat and glitch.com. Working with browser technology is familiar territory. DAT and glitch and web components were new territory. He explored.
No sooner had he developed the Wiki plugin than Ward became interested in building a domain-specific language (DSL) for creating graphs from links between federated Wiki pages. Graphviz is a tool he has returned to again and again throughout his career, and now it is conveniently integrated into Wiki. The results are surprising, regardless of the Law of Fluency.
Return to Reflections on Graphviz Plugin
I've been reflecting recently as to how well the unix shell has held up over time. What else have I used over and over?
I've mostly used the dot component of the suite of graph rendering programs.
Here we collect various mentions of the work we've done observing software through the metadata produced throughout its creation and operation.
See AboutUs Getting Started blog post announcing the open-sourcing of this technology. github 
The Graphviz plugin accepts an unusual dialect of Markup which is really a computer algorithm for visiting pages and drawing what it finds. We'll explain this in simple terms that should get one going quickly.