Alex Wein @alexwein@vis.social

Grateful today and every day for ISO 8601

Clever and maybe useful barchart text function: https://gist.github.com/ltrgoddard/0f8d01bfc937fbcddef7204674b7f23d

sparkbar(c(1:5, 1:5, 6:10, 9:1))
[1] "▁▂▂▃▄▁▂▂▃▄▅▅▆▇█▇▆▅▅▄▃▂▂▁"

This article is pretty consistent with my experience as a Google TVC: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-25/inside-google-s-shadow-workforce

I've been listening *Make My Bed* by King Princess a ton over the last two weeks.

I'm still really new in my job, and gave a big presentation today on my vision for what I'm doing. I feel *very* clever for coming up with this kale analogy:

I admit a bit of aversion to non-interactive animation as a dataviz solution, but when the tools are as easy to use at gganimate, I'm sure I'll figure out some good uses.

Thomas Lin Pederson gave a keynote at UseR yesterday (big annual R conference, I'm not there) on the grammar of animation (via his new and improved gganimate package) and the slides are worth a look https://www.data-imaginist.com/slides/user2018/assets/player/keynotedhtmlplayer#1

And I gotta say, this was even easier to do with ggplot than anticipated. To go from the Line Chart on top to the Gutter Chart on the bottom was primarily one line of code.

It's not a perfect fit for data and chart type (it's very close to just a chart of y=x), and when and how to show nothing is a big and tricky problem. (And obviously the default axis labels aren't gonna cut it). Still, I'm excited about the idea (which is probably not completely novel).

One of my first vis.social hoots was a recommendation to read Understanding Comics. Here's a direct effort to use the grammar of comics in data viz, using gutters to omit the parts where nothing happens.

My current problem: I'm building automated weekly report, showing the same metric over time. I want to show the trend, but I want to emphasize the most recent data point. With a typical 'time on x-axis' line chart, the rightmost value is not where your attention goes. Has anyone thought through this before?

Sketchy coloring extension for ggplot! https://xvrdm.github.io/ggrough/

Thanks for all the replies to my data manipulation tooling. The dplyr library in R is one of my absolute favorite things in the world (I'm not exaggerating). I've been mulling over how to persuade/orient JS folks. These answers were super helpful.

I've been going through some of my old chart-y work. This fella -- from my undergrad topology thesis 10 years ago -- I'm inordinately proud of this.

A question for the D3 pros: what tools do you use for data munging? Javascript, Spreadsheets, SQL (or an ORM), R or Python, something else? If you use JS for most of it, I'd love to know more specifics regarding libraries (or maybe you're just aces with Array.prototype methods)

I'm having a hard time googling for a chart, can anyone help?...there was Viz that went viral earlier in the year: my memory is the first time Trump tweeted about the Mueller investigate, a cable news ran something that looked like this:

I signed an offer letter yesterday, and pending a background check, will be starting a new job in 10 days! I'll be a data engineer, building and maintaining the pipelines and dashboards across a decent sized tech company. After 3 months of coding boot camp and 2 months of job searching, I am fucking pumped to get to work. 📈

Amy Cesal's personal website makes me want to plagiarize http://www.amycesal.com/

She's also doing a really amazing project making charts with Play-Doh (https://twitter.com/hashtag/daydohviz?src=hash)

I spent the last 45 minutes or so with r2d3! Passing data from R to JS is magically smooth, and it takes away some of intimidating setup of D3. I'm still getting my bearings, but it's really promising...now I just gotta learn D3.