Clint Bagley

Check out this round up of some exciting things that happened at Observable in the month of June and be sure to subscribe for future updates.

Observable

June 2022 - What's new on Observable?

Maria Ciampa

We are delighted to introduce Observable Plot 0.5, which now supports more chart types, including hexbins, beeswarms, and more. These new features allow you to be more expressive and articulate in your data work.

Create More Expressive & Articulate Data Visualizations

We're excited to announce the launch of the Observable Data Table Cell. Data Table Cell is a visual data analysis tool that allows you to quickly explore and analyze your data directly in the UI.

Quickly Explore & Analyze Your Data For Faster Insights

Michael Cooper

We recently improved our sign-up process, giving users a chance to set up their public profile while creating their account. Unfortunately, there was a bug in the way we handled avatars & this resulted in a number of users having duplicated avatars. Our team looks back at the process.

Duplicate avatars retrospective

We are delighted to welcome three new people to the Observable team! Virginia Poltrack and Anna Wiederkehr join us as Designers. Maria Ciampa joins as a Content Marketer. Read on as they tell the story — in their own words — of how they got here, why they're excited to work in dataviz, and more.

Meet the Newest Members of the Observable Team

Robert Kosara

Observable may look nothing like Microsoft Excel, but it actually has a lot in common with it - if you change a value, all the calculations that depend on it automatically update. Observable does that and so much more! Let's try it out...

Observable for Excel Users: Introduction

Wayne Sutton

The Observable team is combining efforts to analyze #NBAFinals games & showcase unique ways to use Observable. This notebook series is for NBA fans, the #NBATwitter community + data practitioners to enjoy & experiment with.

Watch The NBA Finals Players Data Jam On Observable

This is a recap of our monthly newsletter - check out some of the exciting things that happened in the month of May and subscribe for future updates.

May 2022 - What's new on Observable?

Michael Cooper joins us as an Engineer on the User Activation team. On the Product Education Team, Paul Buffa and Robert Kosara join as Data Visualization Developers.

Meet the Newest Members of the Observable Team!

Join the Observable community as we discuss what's in the development toolkits of Data Analysts. We'll share resources on how Data Analysts can accelerate their workflows, connect to their databases, create templates, query live data, and more!

Upcoming Data Analyst Events with Observable

Ian Johnson

Today we celebrate both the 1 year anniversary of Observable Plot 🎉 and May The 4th. Please take a look back at this fascinating data exploration of Star Wars movie scripts using Observable Plot.

Analyzing Star Wars movies + the first anniversary of Observable Plot!

In this reprint of our monthly newsletter, we recap some of the exciting things that happened in the month of April.

April 2022 - What's new on Observable?

Carl brings more than two decades of experience in tech recruiting. In this post he shares some insight into his passions and background.

Carl Wilson joins Observable as Head of Recruiting

We are thrilled to welcome this amazing person and longtime industry vet to the Observable team. Learn more about Amanda's story and experience below.

Amanda Waite joins Observable as Engineering Lead

Here at Observable, we believe in shedding light on diverse stories through data and beyond. We believe it is important to acknowledge the lived and shared experiences of all Black people because their struggles and achievements have greatly impacted each and every one of us.

Black History Month Activity

Mike Freeman

Observable Plot is a robust JavaScript library to help you quickly visualize tabular data. These cheatsheets provide an interactive reference and printable PDF to explore each of the foundational concepts of the library: Marks, Scales, Transforms, Layout, and Colors.

Plot Cheatsheets

Visnu Pitiyanuvath

Sometime around August, a bunch of us realized we were all playing The New York Times’s daily mini crossword. We started a Slack channel & shared invite links to add each other to our in-app leaderboards, which use Observable Plot.

Visualizing The New York Times’s Mini Crossword

Melody Meckfessel

Input from community creators and members like you is what drives us to continually evolve Observable and we sincerely thank you for all of the incredible feedback over the past year. 

2021 Retrospective

This year, we would like to recognize some members of our community who have gone above and beyond to be engaged and supportive community members as we continue on the journey of making data accessible to everyone.

2021 Observable Community Recognition

Toph Tucker

Observable has historically credited only one person as the author of each notebook. This didn’t reflect the reality of collaborative work. You can now list whomever you want as co-authors of any notebook. 

Introducing Authors

Mike Bostock

Mike Bostock, our CTO and co-founder is the author of D3.js, an open-source library for data visualization which celebrated its 10th anniversary this year, and Observable Plot, a new library for exploratory visualization that builds on D3. We sat down with him for a Q&A.

Future of Data Work: Q&A with Mike Bostock

Over the past month, the Observable Ambassadors took on the annual #30DayMapChallenge, a community effort to collaboratively create maps focused on various human interest and business-focused topics.

Observable Ambassadors Take Up The #30DayMapChallenge

Deepti Srivastava

The biggest challenge facing our connected world today is making sense of this data with ever-increasing complexity. For businesses, there is an urgent need for cross-functional teams to quickly discover data-driven insights to inform business decisions.

Future of Data Work: Empowering Data Practitioners in One Place

Observable aims to make the end-to-end data-insights journey collaborative and efficient for cross-functional teams working with different types of data. We've recently added two new features to specifically address and streamline the end-to-end spreadsheet-based workflows: Cloud Files and xlsx pars

Spreadsheet-based data collaboration gets supercharged with Observable

Imagine all the ways that data flows through an organization. People explore and analyze data. People ask critical questions of data. All of these people bring diverse skills when engaging with data - data scientists, data analysts, data engineers, developers, product managers and decision makers. 

Future of Data Work: Collaboration and No Limits

Are you trying to keep up with a complex system at your work? Do you keep your finger on the pulse of sales or user signups? Or maybe you make sure the servers keep running when a surprise event happens? 

Averting Disaster with Collaborative Data Visualization

Because GitHub is the largest developer platform in the world - where the world builds software - Observable is excited to share how GitHub users find answers through visualization. GitHub users can connect with their Github accounts, get started with community examples, and more...

Observable + GitHub 💞

Observable is grateful to have a passionate community that has been using the platform and giving feedback from the early days. With their help, we’ve been conducting formal and ad hoc research over the past year and are sharing our insights with our first research report!

Observable shares its first Research Report: State of Dataviz 2021

Observable ambassador & eBay engineer Andrew Wooldridge shares his inspiring journey, insights and tips related to using the Observable canvas.

Observable: Discovering a New World

These are stories about analyzing data that changes over time - data that spikes or dips, that diverge from forecasts, and have seasonal patterns. We hope that this will spark an idea about how to look at your own data in a new way. 

Analyzing Time Series Data

Anjana Vakil

Holy guacamole, do we ever have an action-packed week of #dataviz planned for you!

Join us July 26-30 for a community dataviz contest & livestream spree! Read more about how to participate below - we'll see you there!

#ObservableFTW contest & live events week! July 26-30

Today, we are introducing Observable for Enterprise. ✨ This new Enterprise tier provides additional security and access control to support teams within larger organizations. It includes dedicated support, annual training and onboarding.

Introducing Observable for Enterprise

We are committed to prioritizing marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort, and to supporting the efforts to end oppression and systemic discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community. You will find more about our company commitment to equality in this collection.

2021 Pride Month and LGBTQIA+ Equality

At Observable, we believe that business outcomes and decision-making can be greatly improved if everyone in a team can work with data and gain insights, together... But, we also know that not everyone wants to start from scratch!

Today, we are launching the first set of Observable Templates. 

Introducing Observable Templates!

Upgrading our primary database led to degraded performance of search and collection queries, impacting users during our live Twitch stream workshop on Tuesday. We have resolved the issue and improved Observable’s performance.

Database outage on May 18, 2021

Shan Carter

Movies - During quarantine I’ve been watching a lot of terrible movies late at night. Often I watch them alone, making snarky comments to myself, “There’s no way she could make it downtown in 10 minutes during rush hour!” Sometimes I try to explain their horribleness to my partner the next day.

When What You Notice Isn’t What’s Wrong

We are thrilled to announce Observable Plot, a new open-source JavaScript library for exploratory data visualization.

Observable’s mission is to help everyone make sense of the world with data. To succeed, we need to make visualization easier and faster, both to learn and to practice. 

Introducing Observable Plot

For the foreseeable future, people (or "developers") are writing the world's software. In 2020, there were ~56M+ developers on Github with a predicted 100M+ by 2025 (almost doubling in 5 years!!). Many more people are writing software than ever before.

“Yes And”: Collaboration for software developers

This March, we invited the Observable community to celebrate International Women's Day and Women's History Month by participating in a data visualization contest focused on exploring & celebrating women's rights & milestones through history.

Announcing the Women’s History Month DataViz Contest Winners

We’re excited to announce 🥳 some major improvements to collaboration on Observable: you can now invite up to 4 people to edit or view your notebooks! Collaborators can view each others’ edits and cursors in real-time — so called multiplayer 🎮. It’s like Google Docs or Figma, but with code.

Introducing Observable Collaboration

This February, we invited the Observable community to celebrate Black History Month and Black excellence in data visualization by participating in our first Black History Month DataViz Contest!

Announcing the Black History DataViz Contest Winners

Cassandra Ferrara

The team at Observable uses our product and platform every day. We try to share in the same joys and frustrations. Which means we know there are still improvements, tweaks and fixes that need to happen.

We Don't Know Everything: A better system for feedback

In honor of D3 1.0’s tin anniversary, I thought I’d reflect on lessons learned. This isn’t intended to be too comprehensive or serious — just a handful of observations as I look ahead to the next ten years. But I hope a nugget or two will interest you, too.

10 Years of Open-Source Visualization

My co-founder Mike Bostock and I met back in 2005, while we were working together at Google on the search quality team. We were building tools and experimentation frameworks for data scientists and developers to assess improvements to search.

Why Visualization helps Developers

OK, I swear this story isn’t about me. But it does start with something where I get a little credit. A week before Thanksgiving in 2017, I checked Facebook and saw that my brother’s friend Siân had updated her profile picture.

How D3 Moved Us

It's hard to believe that d3.js is 10 years old. That is a long time to be around, let alone thriving, for anything related to JavaScript.

Powering the D3 Community

Many of the world's iconic data visualizations have been created using D3. And that's because D3 has changed how the world visualizes data. From its release 10 years ago to today, it has transformed what and how dataviz is created in the world.

D3 Turns 10

Building Community: Announcing Our Ambassadors

These lightweight interface components — buttons, sliders, dropdowns, tables, and the like — help you explore data and build interactive displays.

Observable Inputs

We know how challenging it is to work with data. Data is overwhelming for all of us. Making sense of it is the biggest issue facing our connected world. In order to meet that challenge, Observable has been designed to empower people to code, collaborate, and share insights with the world.

Why We're Building Observable

Observable Company Values

Jimmy Zhang

To make managing notebooks easier, users can now define custom URLs on any notebook they can edit: private, shared or previously published, and in both individual and team contexts.

Custom Notebook URLs

We hold ourselves accountable for our commitments. That means continued self-assessment and learning about how we can help and positively impact the BLM, LGBTQIA+ and other communities and the world. We re-evaluate these commitments over time.

Observable for Equality Q3 2020 Update

We are excited to announce a new tool for embedding on Observable! Now, you can share your full interactive notebook on your blog, on platforms like Notion or Wordpress and many more through copy paste using HTML.

Easier Embedding and Sharing with Observable

No notebook is an island; it draws from others’ work, and it exists to say something to someone somewhere else. Sometimes, an image of a chart will not suffice; your notebook may be interactive, or it may pull live data. It’s dynamic, and the version you show elsewhere should be, too.

Introduction to Embedding

How do you build a startup during a global pandemic? This blog post by Observable's Co-founder and CEO, Melody Meckfessel shares a little bit of the story in 2020, how we've adapted and what we've learned on our startup journey. 

The Great Adaptation

Observable Blog

[2021 Observable Community Recognition post](https://observablehq.com/d/79b6744da6ae093e)
Is a broken link. [🎶](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryH5cga0yUI&ab_channel=KateNashVEVO)

Thanks for the comment!  Fixed the link as it changed.