I can’t say for sure what the poet William Blake had in mind in the early 1790’s when he wrote “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”, but I hope he won’t my comparing it to learning by building, also known as constructionism 🔗 . The educational theory of constructionism observes that people learn best by making and sharing things. If you’re looking for effective instruction, there is no substitute for facing the claws of a technical tiger, particularly one you have chosen to meet yourself....

Years ago I built my own CI-CD 🔗 solution for a moderately complex static website. ...

Have you ever spent hours on something, made it work, and then discovered a feature in the language that could have saved you a ton of effort? That’s what happened when I tried to figure out how to draw an arrowhead to a curved line at some distance from the center of a target (see banner). TL;DR When working with custom visualizations, you might need to do some math. But make use of (and give credit to) the community around these tools....

I’ve recently found myself with a little more free time, and so this new site is finally coming together. Topics I will be discussing include the typical meta-topic of hosting and updating affordable static sites on the internet, but I’ll also be touching on the challenge of maintaining control of a site while enabling external contributions … clearly not a thing just yet on this site. Tools of the trade may include (in alphabetical order) AWS 🔗 , Cloudflare 🔗 , GitHub 🔗 , Slack 🔗 and Zapier 🔗 ....

Introduction This post builds on a discussion started last week on managing visualization state. For some more context please see last week’s post. Example - D3 meets React and Angular We start by revisiting (and revising) a simple brushing visualization from Mike Bostock introduced as an example of user interaction with data-driven visualizations. JavaScript-enabled users get an interactive version of this static image. The code for our starting point is fairly typical of D3 sample code....