Today was a great, great day – even more great considering the fact that I didn’t expect such a great day. After coming back from New York last Wednesday night, I didn’t feel so well until yesterday, so being in such a good mood today already surprised me. But these awesome thing happened:
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I had a short Slack conversation with my co-worker David which opened up a whole new world for me: thinking about programming language on a very high-level. I think there is a huge difference between seeing the tools and languages you use as something granted, and critiquing them / seeing their disadvantages and thinking about why this is the case, what you personally prefer and how to make it better. Today I was introduced to this second kind of worldview. We talked about the difference between Python and R. I was complaining that Python made it so complicated to import a CSV. David said that Python is low-level and made to be very readable. R is made to be very terse. “Python will, almost to a fault, use more lines if it makes the code more explicit and readable.” Super interesting.
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I got recorded for a podcast: the “Blind Panels” podcast which is about comics for the blind (such a niche! Great.) As a visualisation person, thinking about blind people is interesting - but the data community and their many experiments got me covered and so I talked about data sonification, data sculptures and Moritz Stefaner’s Data Cuisine.
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I had lunch in the sun! Ah lunch. Lunch is awesome. Sun is awesome. Lunch in the sun is double awesome.
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I booked a flight to Iceland! I will visit Iceland for 4 nights in September with my good friend N from Germany.
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I worked on my massive blogpost about tools and programming languages for data vis and divided it into three parts. It’s getting somewhere! Separating it made it feel so much more real. It’s not a big chunk of notes anymore. It’s actually something that I could post after fine-tuning it for half an hour. I’m very, very excited.
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Aaaand I visited the DC Vizards meetup, which was not the best meetup ever this time, but the people were great.
Input? 6
Output? 5
Learnings?
Money is so awfully relative.
Sometimes a data vis is just great to frame a conversation, and to provide a common visual image for the people in a conversation.
Typing “python import this” into your terminal results in a great, great manifesto.
Questions?
How will I get the most out of the Serendipity days (a mini hackathon at NPR) which will start happening on Wednesday?