Why We're Building Observable
observablehq.com
Why We're Building Observable
1–10 of 86 posts
Re: Why We're Building Observable
#2I really like Observable a lot, and have made a couple of brief, messy visualisations with it (messy in terms of code at least).
I hope at some point they can offer some sort of offline support. The focus on ease of sharing is great, and the volume and breadth of content has really helped me to get more proficient with d3. The inability to open and edit notebooks offline/locally is a real inconvenience, however.
I have a small personal site on Netlify (with Next.js) and going forward I'm looking at hosting the sort of stuff I have on Observable there, simply as it's easier to work to when offline. The quality of the community and resources is a really valuable thing, but the need to be online is a real drawback at times.
Re: Why We're Building Observable
#3Coincidentally, I tinkered with my first Observable notebook last night (https://observablehq.com/@rzg/prosthaphaeresis -- don't judge too harshly).
One of the improvements on the computational notebook concept is that it seems to compute a data flow graph so it knows what cells to update when the data changes, without you needing to re-run cells in a particular sequence. The cells can also be out of order.
The editor interface is pretty slick, and I wish it were open source so I could use it in other projects.
(Mike Bostock, one of the founders, is also the creator of D3.js and the information visualization gallery bl.ocks.org. Here's my favorite: https://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/31bd072e50eaf550d79e)
Re: Why We're Building Observable
#4Coincidentally, I tinkered with my first Observable notebook last night ( https://observablehq.com/@rzg/prosthaphaeresis -- don't judge too harshly). One of the improvements on the computational notebook concept is that it seems to compute a data flow graph so it knows what cells to update when the data changes, without you needing to re-run cells in a particular sequence. The cells can also be out of order. The edit…
The data flow is really well implemented with Observable. The fact you don't need to go through and repeat the execution of a number of downstream cells when you make a change is really useful.
Another great advantage they have is the data map on the right-hand margin. It's a good way of seeing how complex a notebook is getting as well as being a really efficient way of navigating through the data flow.
Re: Why We're Building Observable
#5An issue of visualization on the web I don’t know how to solve is how to load large data.
Re: Why We're Building Observable
#6Great domain. We like hq domains too :)
Re: Why We're Building Observable
#7My gripe with Observable is I can't fit into a Python-based workflow. I.e., a machine learning or gpu-training worfklow. It is a nice place to create explainers, though. I almost think of it as being like a Medium alternative.
Re: Why We're Building Observable
#8I really like Observable and have used it quite a bit, but I absolutely hate that it is the default documentation form for D3, because D3 is a javascript library, and Observable is not javascript. At the very least it would be nice if there was a way to take an example and press a button to get the same thing in javascript.
Re: Why We're Building Observable
#9I'm a big fan of Observable, having used it to prototype and learn a number of different visualizations. Note that you don't just have to use D3, but can use other visualization libraries as well (i.e. Vega-Lite, Highcharts).
I also want to shout out Mike Bostock, one of the company founders (and creator of D3). I emailed him randomly to ask for some help with a d3 package and he replied the next morning.
Busy creators who nevertheless still make themselves available to engaging with the community always impress me!
Re: Why We're Building Observable
#10An issue of visualization on the web I don’t know how to solve is how to load large data.
Observable supports direct DB connections [0], but these only work in private notebooks at the moment.
At Splitgraph [1] we're building a "data delivery network" (DDN, like a CDN but for databases) that looks like a big Postgres database. It works really well with the Observable Postgres client in private notebooks -- you configure it like you would for any Postgres connection. For public notebooks, you can use our HTTP API for sending SQL queries directly to the DDN. Here's an example [2] using that SQL-over-HTTP API to plot some Covid data.
[0] https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/connecting-to-databas...
[1] https://www.splitgraph.com
[2] https://observablehq.com/@mildbyte/splitgraph-ddn-oxcovid19-...