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Data visualization

Data visualization is the graphic representation of data and trends.
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Data visualization blog.regehr.org

Explaining code using ASCII art

A collection of ASCII data structures, state machines, logical structures, and more.

People tend to be visual: we use pictures to understand problems. Mainstream programming languages, on the other hand, operate in an almost completely different kind of abstract space, leaving a big gap between programs and pictures. This piece is about pictures drawn using a text character set and then embedded in source code.

Martin Heinz martinheinz.dev

Data and system visualization tools to boost your productivity

As files, datasets and configurations grow, it gets increasingly difficult to navigate them. There are however many tools out there, that can help you to be more productive when dealing with large JSON and YAML files, complicated regular expressions, confusing SQL database relationships, complex development environments and many others.

Data visualization howisfelix.today

Felix Krause put his "whole life" into a single database

I used scare quotes around “whole life” because those are his words and surely there’s a lot more to life than things you can quantify, but still: this is interesting

Back in 2019, I started collecting all kinds of metrics about my life. Every single day for the last 2.5 years I tracked over 100 different data types - ranging from fitness & nutrition to social life, computer usage and weather.

This data produces 44 graphs that are all shared publicly on the website.

Felix Krause put his "whole life" into a single database

Data visualization jamespotter.dev

Is Hacker News a good predictor of future tech trends?

HN as tech trend? The results seem conclusive, but drop a comment below to share your thoughts on what James shared, his methodology, etc.

There’s a general belief in the tech circles I inhabit that Hacker News is a useful indicator for up-and-coming technologies that will hit the mainstream within the next few years. So I picked some of the major tech topics of the past fifteen years to see if that’s really true. Can I convince myself that checking the HN front page multiple times a day is a useful and productive exercise?

Is Hacker News a good predictor of future tech trends?

Jacob Zelko github.com

Javis.jl - Julia animations and visualizations

For the past year, my friend, Ole Kröger, and I have been developing a native animation package in Julia called, Javis.jl. Through our development process, we have been able to build a nearly 70 person developer community, sponsor Google summer of code students, and help new Julia programmers create powerful visuals! We recently presented the tool at JuliaCon, and were able to show its use for educational outreach and beyond.

Our hope is that this open source tool can be used by programmers, educators, professionals and researchers from across the globe to convey their ideas in winsome and understandable ways!

Data visualization schleiss.io

Plotting the source code "TODO" history of the most popular open source projects

It’s fun seeing the proliferation of TODO comments over time on these bastions of open source. One not-surprising (but still unfortunate) trend: they all pretty much move up and to the right 📈, but a few have had some dramatic reversals 📉 at certain points in time. Go had a crazy month in April 2018 & TypeScript’s TODOs exploded in the Spring of 2018.

Stack Overflow stackoverflow.blog

How often do people actually copy/paste from Stack Overflow? Now we know

April Fool’s may be over, but once we set up a system to react every time someone typed Command+C, we realized there was also an opportunity to learn about how people use our site. Here’s what we found.

TLDR; one in four users copy something within five minutes of hitting a page. But this blog post (and accompanying podcast episode) goes deep into the details and lays it all out for you with pretty charts.

Petr Stribny stribny.name

Which programming languages pay the most? I made my own salary charts...

Synthesized insights from Stack Overflow’s 2020 survey data:

The dataset has 33,447 salary data points which probably isn’t that many given that there are probably around 25 million software developers in the world. You have been warned.

Despite Petr’s warnings, he did go through some trouble to make the data as good as possible (short of, you know, finding or creating more data sources 😉).

Which programming languages pay the most? I made my own salary charts...

Mike Bostock observablehq.com

Did I learn anything from 10 years of D3.js?

Mike Bostock celebrates D3’s 10th by reflecting on what he’s learned over the years. There’s a lot to glean from Mike’s reflections. I really enjoyed this sentiment under the “Don’t go it alone” section:

To avoid entrusting your emotional wellbeing to internet randos (see #8), you must develop relationships with a small, stable group of people that you respect. In other words, find a team (or community) that can provide validation, feedback, support, and mentorship. Maybe this is obvious to everyone but me — yes, Mike, friends are good — but I feel like it’s worth repeating today when so much human interaction happens at a distance.

Python github.com

Apache Superset – a data visualization and data exploration platform

Superset can query data from any SQL-speaking datastore or data engine (e.g. Presto or Athena) that has a Python DB-API driver and a SQLAlchemy dialect.

This has been around long enough to be picked up by the Apache Foundation, but somehow it’s avoided my radar until today. The visualizations you can achieve with it are impressive, to say the least.

Apache Superset – a data visualization and data exploration platform
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