Notebooks & Visualizations – Welcome to The Observaguild with Anjana Vakil

1

Observable

Anjana: So Observable...I've worked at Observable since early 2020. It had been in development as a notebook environment for a few years before that. And I think it had been an idea in its creator's mind. So Mike Bostock, who also created D3, I think had had the interactive notebook in-browser prototyping environment in his mind for much longer than that. And it was initially a project called D3 Express. And so, over the years, it morphed into a small three-person team who is building out this product in sort of a beta mode for a couple of years. And then it became a startup officially on the scene with some seed funding, and then Series A in 2019, I believe. And so yeah, it's been around for a few years, and we've had some people making amazing stuff on the platform for the last few years.

#Data Visualization #Data Dashboard #Data Science Notebooks 286 social mentions

2

Jupyter

And Observable’s notebook environment runs based on a functional reactive paradigm. So essentially, every time you update one cell in your notebook, anything else that depends on that cell automatically updates. So what you have is instead of having to mentally keep track of the state of your notebook, and the changes you've made to it, and which cells you've rerun, and which cells you haven't, Observable handles all of that for you. And as you change things, the rest of the notebook updates automatically. So whereas in Jupyter, you have the advantage of all these different languages, these different kernels, different ecosystems that you can work in like in Python, in Observable, what you get is the web ecosystem. You get all of that. You get all of JavaScript.

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3

GitHub

And I think now there's this awesome movement for more openness around the code used in academic studies and scientific research. And there are amazing projects to host that code and make it reproducible. I mean, GitHub itself is really useful. But I think that's still a muscle that the academic and scientific community is still collectively building. So this is another thing that's so awesome about having everything be beyond the web and whether it's in a Jupyter Notebook that's hosted somewhere on GitHub or on somebody's site or whether it's in an Observable notebook that's hosted on observablehq.com.

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4

D3.js

Anjana: So Observable...I've worked at Observable since early 2020. It had been in development as a notebook environment for a few years before that. And I think it had been an idea in its creator's mind. So Mike Bostock, who also created D3, I think had had the interactive notebook in-browser prototyping environment in his mind for much longer than that. And it was initially a project called D3 Express. And so, over the years, it morphed into a small three-person team who is building out this product in sort of a beta mode for a couple of years. And then it became a startup officially on the scene with some seed funding, and then Series A in 2019, I believe. And so yeah, it's been around for a few years, and we've had some people making amazing stuff on the platform for the last few years.

#Javascript UI Libraries #Charting Libraries #Data Visualization 159 social mentions