QtPass, one world

Twelve years of QtPass in three minutes and twelve seconds. Nothing in the film is drawn by hand: the rock, the towers and the planets are the commits, tests and classes of QtPass, read from its git history. It has music and sound, also made from the same data, and no speech.

How to read it

• The canyon wall is the code. Every month of work is a layer of rock, laid down by a glowing front. A layer wears away when later work replaces it.
• The city is the tests. Every test suite is a tower, and every test a window that lights up green the moment the test lands.
• The solar system is the classes. Every class is a planet as big as its lines of code. A class split off another buds out of it like a drop and drifts to its own orbit.
• Fireworks, beacons and rings round the sun are releases. One release shows in the rock, over the town and in the sky at once, because all three run on one clock.

What happens in it

Time in the film is not the calendar's. It opens on the finished world, runs twelve years backwards to the first commit on an empty plain, and plays forward from there.

• 30 July 2014: the first commit.
• November 2016: Pass, ImitatePass and RealPass split off MainWindow. The first test follows in December.
• 22 December 2017: a flaw in password generation is reported. It is fixed in 1.2.1 on 4 January 2018 (CVE-2017-18021).
• 2019 to 2025: seven quiet years, with 3 tests and 28 classes.
• 2026: 2,311 commits, 44% of all history, and 61% of the older code replaced.
• 22 September 2026: 214 tests land in 23 minutes. The film shows that night three times, from the street, the rock and the sky.

Where it ends: 61 classes, 31,254 lines, 1,271 tests, 5,252 commits and 64 locales, counted on 10 November 2026.

The three films it brings together

Each part was first a film of its own. These play on YouTube, in 4K:

• The history as a canyon
• The tests as a city at night, and the same with Ukrainian titles
• The classes as a solar system

How it was made

The pictures are rendered with Blender, the soundtrack is generated from the same data (a ping for every commit, a blip for every test, a bell for every new class, a boom for every release) and the titles are set in Lato. The code is MIT licensed, so you can point it at your own project: qtpass-world, with the parts in qtpass-strata, qtpass-city and qtpass-orbits.

Thanks to everyone who wrote, tested, translated and reported bugs in QtPass over twelve years: the contributors on GitHub and the translators on Weblate.