P`s Blog

Princiya

To D3 or not

August 8, 2020 • ☕️ 2 min read

Earlier this year, I spoke at AgentConf 2020, Dornbirn, Austria on To D3 or not.

Slide 1

My first encounter with D3.js

I was working at a research lab Aiaioo Labs doing work on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). One of the research projects was Intelligent Digital Menu for Restaurants which had a graph to show trends based on a recommendation algorithm for the digital restaurant menu. A designer colleague came up to me with a prototype and asked what did I think! It was an interactive bar and line chart.

That's how I got in

Given my JavaScript background, and back then with a most recent experience of hacking into Yuijs (Yahoo Charts), I said I would make it work! D3 was like jQuery, but most important to me, it was JavaScript!

The year was 2012, and Big Data was the new hype back then. I was also volunteering for DataKind Bangalore during the weekends. Amidst a bunch of data scientists, I was the data viz diva with my D3 skills!

Lightbeam

In 2017, I worked on Lightbeam with Mozilla, a browser extension which shows first and third party web trackers as you browse the internet. The visualisation grows based on your browsing history, and uses an interactive force-directed graph which uses D3’s force-directed graph algorithm. The initial work was supported by Outreachy and later funded by PrototypeFund.de

Lightbeam