Duane Millar Barlow

Maria Ciampa

Observable is now using the TypeScript Language Server to provide contextual editor hints. Software Engineer Duane Millar Barlow explains how it was implemented.

Observable

Bringing the TypeScript Language Server to Observable

Allison Horst

Using "import" is a fast and intuitive way to access helpful code and content from across the vast network of Observable notebooks.

3 ways using 'Import' expedites data science workflows

Hena Ghaznavi

Tereza Iofciu

Tereza Iofciu, PhD, Observable Ambassador, Head of Data Science at neuefische

Melody Meckfessel

Observable CEO Melody Meckfessel recently took the stage at CMX 2022 to chat with Observable Community Lead Wayne Sutton on how our community (you) helps to build Observable, and how we support our community.

How our community builds Observable

Paul Buffa

Now that we've established that JavaScript is the future of data analysis, Observable Dataviz Developer Paul Buffa shares hands-on, practical, and simple ways to get started using JavaScript for data analysis.

4 ways to get started with JavaScript for data analysis

Ayodele Odubela

In this two-part series, Data Scientist Ayodele Odubela suggests ways to expedite moving into the production phase. Here in part one, Odubela discusses how to help team members get aligned with a model, and get collaborating. 

3 tips for data scientists to move from model to production - fast

Ian Johnson

Clint Bagley

To better educate ourselves and to offer a resource to anyone following the retail industry, our own Data Visualization Developer Ian Johnson created a notebook that uses visualization techniques to shed light on the monthly retail sales numbers shared by the US Census bureau. Fork and explore.

Visualizing monthly retail reports to better uncover insights

Andrew Wooldridge, Observable Ambassador, Senior Software Engineer

Courtney Francis

We are delighted to welcome two new people to the Observable team! Hena Ghaznavi joins as Community + Social Manager, and Courtney Francis joins as Community Manager for Education.

Meet the newest members of the Observable team

JavaScript is the future for data analysis, because it's ubiquitous, compatible, and has incredible support from the developer community.

4 ways JavaScript makes data analysis faster and easier

Aaron Kyle Dennis

Ambassador Spotlight: Aaron Kyle Dennis, Social Development Specialist at Asian Development Bank

Erika Barbosa

Cameron DeCoster

We are delighted to welcome two new people to the Observable team! Learn a bit more about them...

Andrea Mignone

In July 2022, Andrea Mignone, PhD, was kind enough to share his story with the Observable team. We learned a bit more about his background and interests, as well as how he's used Observable.

Ambassador Spotlight: Andrea Mignone, Software Engineer and Data Architect

Max Graze

﻿﻿Data Visualization Engineer ﻿& Observable Ambassador ﻿Maxene Graze says: ﻿"I learn best by looking at other people's code and either trying to recreate it, or changing it around and then seeing what happens. The fact that I can do that in Observable is really helpful, and it made me learn faster."

Ambassador Spotlight: Maxene Graze, Data Visualization Engineer at MURAL

David Kirkby

Wayne Sutton

Observable Ambassador and Cosmology Professor David Kirkby studies the origin and evolution of the Universe. Read more about his data work, and check out his Penrose Quilt notebook, here.

Ambassador Spotlight: David Kirkby, Professor of Cosmology at UC Irvine

Rachel Weissman-Hohler

savannah

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.

June 2022 - What's new on Observable?

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 with Plot 0.5

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

Virginia Poltrack

Anna Wiederkehr

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

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.

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

Visnu Pitiyanuvath

Mike Freeman

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 Wilson

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

Amanda Waite

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

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

Toph Tucker

Ramona

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

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

Dunstan Orchard

Justin Ting

Lauren Buchman

Mike Bostock

Shan Carter

Wiltse Carpenter

Claire Collery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Observable Company Values

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

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

At the heart of Observable is the community. The community creates, collaborates, connects, and influences with data. The Observable Ambassador program is a partnership to work more closely with community members who are actively using Observable.