TheHeasman

Before my current job in data, I was a Data Journalist for 4-5 years. Frustrated by the limitations of Datawrapper and Flourish, I vowed one day to learn D3 so I could create the custom visuals I adored to look at in the wild. Things like scrollable streamgraphs, scrollable charts, and...okay I just liked scrollytelling.

Fast forward some years, and circumstances mean I finally had the chance to learn d3. It's been just over a year. I've hacked together a flourish scrollytelling story, and I recreated some of the flourish template charts I've used in my newsletter in d3... but nothing that had that oomph that I got from reading something from The Pudding or one of The Economist's in-depth essays.

I picked up The Odyssey for another writing project (not related to the movie, but I guess its in the zeitgeist) a few months ago, and while reading and listening to some lectures I was gripped by an essay. I also was gripped by a few cool visual animations I could do in d3 and svg to help tell the story.

A bit of furious coding, tweaking vector graphics, a crash course in animating things with CSS (yes, a bit of LLMs helped with that, but not as much as you think, this is an art project after all), and a bunch of rewrites and e voila - the project I'm most proud of so far.

Aristotle's golden mean.

I stand corrected. Thanks for pointing that out. Learned something new.

Ahhhhh. Thanks man. And totally nerding out here because YES. ANIMATIONS. Animations is why I fell in love with wanting to learn D3 in 2019. You can do things as you transition between data steps, that honestly, has been such a pain in the behind to try with anything else. I'm not a web developer. I'm a data guy.

I'll check that out. At the moment I'm just building up a bunch of template code which I'll re-use. But might check out solid.js.

Yaaasss. I think of it as being able to use a pencil to draw charts (and do creative stuff like Florence Nightingale's original polar area graph), instead of having a stencil that can draw things for you. It's a way to visually manipulate the DOM in a way if you're comfortable with data.

You can simply just use Tableau or Power BI and take screenshots otherwise.

Uh, there are arrow operators in JS. D3.JS in Action Third Edition exclusively uses arrow operators.

(Trust me. I don't know jack about JavaScript, I had to get through the MDN docs to understand what they were, and once I did, made a whole lot more sense).

Agreed. I fudged quite a lot in my post to make it accessible to the layman. Triee to explain to a UX designer I know that "D3 is a library for JavaScript that..." And I saw their brain switch off live in front of me.

Semantics matter more than literals sometimes.

*EDIT: Grammar. I was typing on my phone. Soz.

This is very fair: I went for a metaphorical explanation, rather than a literal one. (For instance, I'd actually have had to write down the code for an SVG, and I was quickly writing this on my lunch break).

The `.selectAll().data().join()` data binding method (or `.enter()` on older versions) is very intuitive once you understand it, but for the layman coming in, it's inaccessible AF. I fudged a little in my explanation to make it more accessible. But hey. That's learning.

"The survey was designed to search for bodies with orbits that extend far above and below the plane of the Earth's orbit around the sun, part of the outer solar system that hasn’t been well-studied."

Christ. I didn't realise we hadn't looked at stuff not in Earth's plane. That's a tonne of space to explore, right in our own backyard.

The joys of being at a platform's mercy.

My first predictive analytics project in my Data Journalism career.

I've read this article before and I got a little annoyed. I've never ever heard "write drunk, edit sober" been advised in a literal context, but a metaphorical context.

Write drunk - shitty first draft where you don't care.

Edit sober - reasonable editing done when you have a fresh pair of eyes.

Why on earth did the author take this advice literally?

>Or scientific articles that go against the politically correct narrative?

Wut?

There's a thing called the political opposition (or over here in Brit Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition) and that's how democracies stop authoritarian rules y'know.

Gaming was one of the first markets for the Personal Computer, productivity was a sideshow for a bit.

>Google self-anonymises with a flag in their API

Even if they could, they wouldn't be able to find it.

Y'all know that there are business models where you don't need to take VC money to scale right?

Branson said the same thing about the Virgin Group when he turned it from a public to a private company.

There's some pretty exciting stuff happening in the startup scene in Nigeria, most famously Zuckerberg's PR visit to Lagos a few months ago.

Konga (a Nigerian company) is trying to upset Joomla (a South African company) to become the Amazon of Africa, and co-working spaces are starting to sprout all over the place.

There are over a hundred different mobile payment solutions, not just in the micro-payment sector, but for traditional middle class spending.

There's also been a recent boost for Nigeria to get back into agriculture (~80% - 90% of produce is imported. Welcome to the Resource Curse), there are some entrepreneurs trying to approach this field with the advantages tech can bring to the African agriculture landscape.