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TheHeasman

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Data Journalist. Which means I dabble with words, I write a script or two, and I visualise some graphs. Prev at LandTech & work featured in The Times and BBC.

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Why is D3 so Verbose? 11 months ago

Ahhhhh. Thanks man. And totally nerding out here because YES. ANIMATIONS. Animations is why I fell in love with wanting to learn D3 in 2019. You can do things as you transition between data steps, that honestly, has been such a pain in the behind to try with anything else. I'm not a web developer. I'm a data guy.

Why is D3 so Verbose? 11 months ago

I'll check that out. At the moment I'm just building up a bunch of template code which I'll re-use. But might check out solid.js.

Why is D3 so Verbose? 11 months ago

Yaaasss. I think of it as being able to use a pencil to draw charts (and do creative stuff like Florence Nightingale's original polar area graph), instead of having a stencil that can draw things for you. It's a way to visually manipulate the DOM in a way if you're comfortable with data.

You can simply just use Tableau or Power BI and take screenshots otherwise.

Why is D3 so Verbose? 11 months ago

Uh, there are arrow operators in JS. D3.JS in Action Third Edition exclusively uses arrow operators.

(Trust me. I don't know jack about JavaScript, I had to get through the MDN docs to understand what they were, and once I did, made a whole lot more sense).

Why is D3 so Verbose? 11 months ago

Agreed. I fudged quite a lot in my post to make it accessible to the layman. Triee to explain to a UX designer I know that "D3 is a library for JavaScript that..." And I saw their brain switch off live in front of me.

Semantics matter more than literals sometimes.

*EDIT: Grammar. I was typing on my phone. Soz.

Why is D3 so Verbose? 11 months ago

This is very fair: I went for a metaphorical explanation, rather than a literal one. (For instance, I'd actually have had to write down the code for an SVG, and I was quickly writing this on my lunch break).

The `.selectAll().data().join()` data binding method (or `.enter()` on older versions) is very intuitive once you understand it, but for the layman coming in, it's inaccessible AF. I fudged a little in my explanation to make it more accessible. But hey. That's learning.

"The survey was designed to search for bodies with orbits that extend far above and below the plane of the Earth's orbit around the sun, part of the outer solar system that hasn’t been well-studied."

Christ. I didn't realise we hadn't looked at stuff not in Earth's plane. That's a tonne of space to explore, right in our own backyard.

I've read this article before and I got a little annoyed. I've never ever heard "write drunk, edit sober" been advised in a literal context, but a metaphorical context.

Write drunk - shitty first draft where you don't care.

Edit sober - reasonable editing done when you have a fresh pair of eyes.

Why on earth did the author take this advice literally?

Magic Leap One 9 years ago

Gaming was one of the first markets for the Personal Computer, productivity was a sideshow for a bit.

Founder Friendly 9 years ago

Y'all know that there are business models where you don't need to take VC money to scale right?

There's some pretty exciting stuff happening in the startup scene in Nigeria, most famously Zuckerberg's PR visit to Lagos a few months ago.

Konga (a Nigerian company) is trying to upset Joomla (a South African company) to become the Amazon of Africa, and co-working spaces are starting to sprout all over the place.

There are over a hundred different mobile payment solutions, not just in the micro-payment sector, but for traditional middle class spending.

There's also been a recent boost for Nigeria to get back into agriculture (~80% - 90% of produce is imported. Welcome to the Resource Curse), there are some entrepreneurs trying to approach this field with the advantages tech can bring to the African agriculture landscape.

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Tesla Energy 11 years ago

Forget the USA.

Imagine what these decreased battery prices are going to do for solar power in LEDCs.