Today I was building some retry logic for some code that forwarded data to a third-party service and wanted to visualize the backoff function I had written. I wanted to see how many retries would be made in the 10-15 minute window after the initial retry. Gnuplot was the obvious choice for visualizing this as I had recently used it for some data exploration work and knew it had built-in support for plotting mathematical functions. The final result looks like this:
