My First Visualization

Most of my experience was in making dashboards. I could build a metamodel, do some simple data cleaning, and use a BI tool to make the visual or dashboard that I desired. While I enjoyed this, through my time on the SEMOSS team I got to learn more about what development looks like and the power that comes with it. From there I started to try and understand more of the SEMOSS Front End Architecture by pestering some developers with questions.

I came to understand that there were two types of open-sourced visualizations that SEMOSS primarily used; d3 and echarts. So I knew where to look, but what could I visualize? Coming up with these questions has never been a strong suit of mine, but I figured out the perfect place to look. This brings me to Reddit.

A Reddit through called Data Is Beautiful (check it out) was brought to my attention and I was a big fan of seeing all of the cool and flashy ways people visualized the most random data. From there we saw that there was a monthly Data Viz contest, and I finally had something fun to visualize. Brainstorming with a friend, we jokingly said on Sunday night we would grab dinner and work on winning this competition. We coined it 'Dinner Data Viz'. As you can imagine, I went too far with it and put up an entire page around it! I'm not kidding, Dinner Data Viz is a real thing I created. Below is the scatter plot, from the contest in August.

This ended up being a project I truly enjoyed, and I felt that I was challenged all the way through. While it's a very simple scatter plot (I never even submitted it to the competition), I got to learn how to use the d3 API which I was very excited about. What's next? Allow users to interact with it! Have a color picker, design the tooltip, all within the page. Check back and it might look different.