On building a computational notebook and the things people do with it. We believe in looking at code.
If you point to a random book in Julio’s picture-perfect background, has he read it? How many biographies does he read per American president? And is reading dying?
Last week, Observable launched a total rewrite of notebooks. Contra Joel Spolsky’s advice, Mike Bostock has done many rewrites, from TiVo to Protovis to D3, and itches to do many more. Why?
Toph recounts seven moments in visualization history, in no particular order: 1923’s gestalt theory, 2025’s graph embeddings, 1933’s map–territory relation, 1975’s splines, 2016’s acquired code of meaning, 2020’s bridging code and interaction, and 1973’s conversation analysis. For sources, see https://new.observablehq.com/@tophtucker/classic-research-in-data-visualization.
Visnu and Toph give a preview of the new notebook listings and editor by surveying some trending community notebooks and highlighting the tiny touches that make the new experience simpler, faster, and more robust.
Visnu and Toph reflect on three eras of building Observable features atop LLMs, from a notebook sidebar (2023) to Canvases (2025) to a new experimental prototype, Observable Chat.
Julio joins Mike to explain Observable’s mission to make computation universally accessible and understandable. They talk about the value of open source and community, the challenge of designing social collaboration platforms, and the promise and risks of AI.
Mike and Toph return for the second episode to talk reactivity and making code easier for humans to understand. They show the quirky syntax of Notebooks 1.0, and how Notebooks 2.0 brings reactivity to standard (vanilla) syntax.
In this inaugural (practice?) episode of the Observable Podcast, Mike and Toph share reflections on building with Next.js and how React has evolved over the years. They are excited by, and a little scared of, the magic of React Server Functions.