Learning to code your own breakfast
Data
Curious
2020.02.24
Hello!
Last week I stumbled upon this tweet, and I just can't stop thinking about it. It's not about data viz specifically, but stay with me:
I was never able to put words into why I loved learning to program so much before this tweet, but I think it came down to this:
I wanted to cook my own damn food.
You see, learning to code is hard (for lots of reasons). But learning to learning to code can be even harder than the act itself. I love this idea of empowering yourself to make new things, small things, custom things. And to do it while spending time with people you love.
We're not all going to go to a bootcamp and land developer jobs overnight. Some people may not even use code in their day jobs. But I know, at least for myself, learning to code opened up a whole new world for me. Even if it didn't always taste amazing, I could cook my own food. I could make it how I like it.
Technology, especially as it relates to data-related work, changes at breakneck speed. If you're learning something new in programming, maybe stop to ask yourself: what can I cook with this?
Once you find your why, the how becomes that much easier.
(You can read the full blog from Robin Sloan on why and how he built a messaging app for his family here.)
- Ben
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Viz of the week
It's a...it's a....circle-packed voronoi diagram with a donut arc around the side?! Nadieh Bremer is keeping it weird in the very best of ways. These graphics for a Greenpeace story on toxic pesticides pack in so much information while still remaining readable and beautiful. Check out the full set.
Words to read
Why the Internet Makes Us Anxious — And How Data Visualization Can Help
Christian Marc Schmidt from Schema Design wrote about how we can build visual user interfaces to make the internet less overwhelming. The article is a response to a quote from designer Richard Saul Wurman’s influential book:
“Information anxiety is the black hole between data and knowledge, and it happens when information doesn’t tell us what we want or need to know.”
Wurman wasn't specifically talking about data visualization here, but I love how Christian made this connection in his article and embodies this principle in his work at Schema.
Visuals to explore
Do Authors Write Where They Know?
I was totally sucked into this visual essay at The Pudding examining how close famous books are set in relation to their authors. What's so brilliant about it is the relatability: how many times have you wondered if the author grew up in the place they wrote about? And that viz combination of arc diagram + waffle bar? Amazing. Such a fun and insightful piece.
Elsewhere on the web
An arc-flow diagram of attacks from the ninth Democratic debate. Maybe I'm just really into arcs lately, but I love this visual format.
Expanding pixel boxes to show how absurdly rich Mike Bloomberg really is.
Grafiti.io: a search engine to find that data visualization you've been looking for
Maps showing how half the world's coral reefs have been killed by climate change
Things to learn
Uber's visual debugging tool for ML
Uber open sourced a new tool called Manifold, which provides an interface and set of data visualizations to "help data scientists to accelerate the detect performance issues with models and datasets."
Quickly create maps using open EU data
eurostat-map.js is a "reusable library to quickly create and customise web maps showing Eurostat data directly retrieved from Eurostat database."
Make better charts in Illustrator
I've been following the Datylon product growth for a while now and it's exciting to see the product finally live. Their graph library offers a whole new suite of chart types and the ability to build custom, reusable charts within Adobe Illustrator.
Label your training data with label-studio
Label-studio is an open-source data labeling, annotation and exploration tool. Looks useful for creating quick prototypes and mockups for labeling machine learning datasets.
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