Mike Bostock

medium.com/@mbostock · Personal blog · on HN since 2015

Mike Bostock, creator of D3 and Observable, writes about data visualization, mapping, and JavaScript tooling.

What HN saysHN commenters praise him as a prolific writer of tutorials and examples, and cite his command-line cartography series, though one got stuck on projections.
34HN people shared it
12linked it in comments
28stories submitted
819story points
2 years agolast shared
2015people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
    What Makes Software Good?
    12 people · 149 points · first shared 2016 · 18 comments on HN
  2. 2
  3. 3
    A tour of d3-geo’s new command-line interface
    6 people · 6 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
  4. 4
    Introducing d3-scale
    4 people · 329 points · first shared 2015 · 73 comments on HN
  5. 5
    Introducing d3-shape
    3 people · 220 points · first shared 2015 · 19 comments on HN
  6. 6
    Why you should use D3
    3 people · 6 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
  7. 7
    A Package Manager Without the Registry
    2 people · 5 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
  8. 8
    Prereleases and Npm
    2 people · 2 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
  9. 9
  10. 10
    A Cranky Critique of Chrome's “Enhanced Bookmarks”
    1 people · 2 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
  11. 11
    Let s make a d3 plugin c8e697599f48
    1 people · first shared 2015

What HN people wrote when they linked it

dovin · 2017-08-01
The great thing about D3 is that Mike Bostock is a prolific writer of tutorials and examples. For map-making, I taught myself a lot of D3 with his Let's Make a Map article (https://bost.ocks.org/mike/map/), which is now a bit outdated with the update to D3 4.x so there's a new tutorial series here: https://medium.com/@mbostock/command-line-cartography-part-1-897aa8f8c…
adolph · 2022-01-18
I think I'm effectively a flat earther because I wasn't able to generalize Bostock's "Command Line Cartography" [0]--totally got stuck trying to work out projections for different shapes. I notice that no other comment has brought up the challenges of calculating different projections, does it just come naturally to other people? 0. https://medium.com/@mbostock/command-line-cartography-part-1-897aa8f8c… 1. https://spatialreference.org/ref/epsg/nad83-california-albers/
mbostock · 2018-01-31
I wrote more about the motivation for Observable (formerly d3.express) last year: https://medium.com/@mbostock/a-better-way-to-code-2b1d2876a3a0 It’s easy to use D3 within Observable, but it’s not pre-loaded or specifically built-in. Any browser library published to npm can be loaded via require (for AMD) or dynamic import (for ES modules). I’ve published a bunch of notebooks with D3 but you’ll find other ones with THREE.js, Vega-Lite, Leaflet and other libraries.
brailsafe · 2017-10-24
Mike Bostock of D3 puts this API to use in his somewhat esoteric but very impressive Command Line Cartography tutorial series. https://medium.com/@mbostock/command-line-cartography-part-1-897aa8f8c…
jasoncrawford · 2017-09-29
New venture from @mbostock, @tmcw and @jashkenas. Probably based on d3.express, which Bostock announced earlier this year but is still in private beta: https://medium.com/@mbostock/a-better-way-to-code-2b1d2876a3a0 Looking forward to it!
jarpineh · 2017-06-21
This looks so very useful. Also, good timing since we're just about to make a new visualization which could be used for more things in future. I dabbled with Plotly when it was announced, but had trouble with connecting our data sources and ran out of time. I see the OP is here answering questions. Have you thought about Gapminder like animations? I'd like to show our statistics with map data from our GIS systems. In the announcement the Walmart demo shows map from Mapbox so there's support for their service. Could you elaborate on what options there is for visualizing geographic information? There was so much in the announcement from Jupyter to Excel like reactive components. It resembles Mike Bostock's D3.express in this regard [1]. I can't wait to start playing with this! [1] https://medium.com/@mbostock/a-better-way-to-code-2b1d2876a3a0
tzaman · 2017-01-06
> 4: Raw SVG >= D3 for simple data visualisations You can have a bit of both. D3 has a dependency "d3-scale" [0], which is a perfect choice if you'd like D3 to do the math and React to take care of the DOM. 0: https://medium.com/@mbostock/introducing-d3-scale-61980c51545f#.3ohtn0…
Hupriene · 2016-09-26
d3v4 is improving the logic around .enter() a bit. See https://medium.com/@mbostock/what-makes-software-good-943557f8a488 Search for "Removing the magic of enter.append"
octref · 2018-02-01
The app itself is well done, but the editing experience is quite lacking...It's 2018 and people don't want to write html/css/js as if writing txt files. https://codesandbox.io can be a good inspiration to learn from. I believe its popularity is a result of using Monaco[0] and supporting Language Servers[1]. I would advise looking into editing/language support early. Auto completion (for DOM API, D3 API, etc) and error checking can be very helpful to the user. Still, congratulations to the launch (the app looks beautiful and UX is pretty solid)! When I was reading @mbostock's medium post[2] a few months ago I knew something like this will popup. Anyway, back to building my own thing which focuses on the editing side of playgrounds, which I think is what most online ones (Codepen / JSFiddle) lack. [0]: https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor [1]: https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol [2]: https://medium.com/@mbostock/a-better-way-to-code-2b1d2876a3a0

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