Hi <<First Name>>,

I'd like to welcome you again, whether you've signed up from Create With Data, D3 in Depth or Animated Data. I've merged a few of my mailing lists so I can stay in touch via a single newsletter.

My aim is to share my knowledge of data visualisation with you, in particular how to build charts, dashboards and data stories.

My particular interest is in programming tools, mainly stemming from R, Python and JavaScript. For example, tools such as R's Shiny and ggplot2, Python's Streamlit and Dash and in the JavaScript world, the likes of D3, Chart.js and Leaflet.

I've been thinking about what to write in these emails. An obvious idea is to collate a list of interesting links and send that to you every month or so. To be honest, I'm not sure I've the inclination, nor the time, to do this! (By the way, there are people who do this really well, such as Data is Plural, Fair Warning, Data Curious and Quantum of Sollazzo).

However, what I do love is experimenting with different ways of building charts and dashboards. I'm currently playing around with building interactive dashboards and finding the easiest way to build them.

Streamlit

For example, I've been trying out Streamlit. This is a fantastic Python library for building interactive charts and dashboards and the amount of code you need to write is probably as minimal as it gets.

For creating a simple interactive data exploration tool, Streamlit is a fantastic tool. However it's quite easy to come up against limits. For example, I had a go at creating an interactive map using its map component. This got me so far, and I found that I had to use it's slightly lower level pydeck_chart component which requires deeper knowledge.

Click here to view the example.

JavaScript

I've spent much more time in the JavaScript world than R or Python and I think a JavaScript only solution would be just a little more complex (and much more flexible). And that's where I think I can provide value in this newsletter.

Thus my plan over the coming months is to experiment with ways of building interactive dashboards and to share with you the easiest and most cost effective ways of doing this.

For example I'm currently experimenting with a JavaScript-based dashboard that visualises RNLI lifeboat data and have found a solution that lets you interactively explore a dataset with over 40,000 rows.

This doesn't use a backend database, nor does it need to load the entire dataset. In fact, it can be statically hosted using a free service such as Surge or Netlify.

I'll share more details in my next email, but for now here's a preview.

Course discount

To celebrate my new series of newsletters, I'd like to share a special discount on my video based course Visualising Data with JavaScript. This course shows how to build charts, data stories and data dashboards using JavaScript. For a 25% discount use coupon code CWDJUN24. (This is valid until the end of July 2024.)

Thanks for your interest, and until next time,

Peter