Writing on data visualisation, software design and company building.

All of our long-form thoughts on data visualisation, programming, leadership, product design, and more, collected in chronological order.

Seamless

Developing a snapping algorithm for a floorplanner.

Faster image uploads

Keeping people happy through timely feedback.

Reno

From bathroom planners to product launches.

World marathon courses infographic

Every now and then I like to put together an infographic poster as quickly as I can. My latest attempt is this poster of World Marathon Courses.

Allotment: a React component for resizable split views

As part of my work with a client, Vega Protocol, we identified a need for a simple split pane component to use in their web application. What’s a split pane component you ask? It looks something like this.

Supporting two major version of D3

A new version of d3 was released recently. As I maintain a few open source d3-related libraries I was curious what work would be required to support the new version. It turns out not to be too difficult and I wanted to share my experience.

What makes for a memorable oar design?

Last month I put together a quiz game: Inspector Oars. The intended audience is pretty niche; people involved in rowing at Cambridge and Oxford universities. You’re given the name of a college and asked to pick the rowing oar design used by that college from a selection.

East Croydon: Where art thou?

I have a confession. Whenever I have an opportunity to use a ticket machine at a train station I’m secretly hoping to discover some new annoyance I can rant about.

A command-line spreadsheet

The ability to quickly open, explore, summarize, and analyze datasets is an important part of data visualization. As part of putting together data for an infographic on bike thefts in the UK I wanted to see which post codes saw the most reported thefts. Crime data can be downloaded from: data.police.uk.

How do you stack up?

In my last post I looked at visualising distributions. Let's apply what we learnt there to a real world data set. We'll continue our theme of using a set of rowing race results. You can see the result below.

Visualising distributions

Visualising the distribution of data is something that crops up frequently. This blog post by Dark Horse Analytics does a good job summarising a few of the options available.

Women's Eights Head of the River Race winning times

The Women's Eights Head of the River Race is the largest women's rowing race in the world with around 2,880 women racing and 320 crews taking part. The race sees novices and Olympic champions competing together on the same stretch of water in London. It's the same course as the annual Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race (although usually in the opposite direction).

Leaflet + D3

This is a demonstration of using Leaflet and D3 together.

Resuable charts and extensible frameworks

A few months ago, I wrote about reusable charts. The thinking behind the blog post fed into the initial design for a new web application - Financial Canvas Studio. It helps professionals in the pension industry understand their financial models and the assumptions that go into them - leading to smarter decisions.

Readme-driven development

You've joined a new team. IT have set you up with a sweet new machine. You're eager to dive in and start contributing so you jump over to the GitHub repository to check out the readme...

Reusable charts

When it comes to creating visualizations on the web D3 is often your first port of call. Whether by putting together a custom creation from scratch, or making use of one of the many charting libraries and examples available.