Posts tagged: webdev

I recently subscribed to Ben Clinkinbeard’s learn D3.js in 5 days, and am currently on day 3. I read through the first 2 days, and felt fairly comfortable with selecting elements, so I did not follow along on the first two days. I probably should have, but there are only so many hours in the day.

D3 is the ubiquitous dynamic visualization library for building custom interactive visualizations on the web. It is a bit low level, and more verbose than many other libraries that build upon it, but if you want full control D3 is the way to go. I have used a few libraries built upon d3 in the past and have been very happy with the results. For now I want to start learning a bit about how d3 works. I know that learning it is going to take a long time, so I want to start working on some simple examples now in order to build my understanding so that I can learn quickly when I am ready to dive in. If I never decide I need to take the deep dive into d3, I think understanding how it works will only help when I am using higher level libraries.

I cant express how fun it was to build this example. I always saw d3 as being super low level and that I could never build something in it. It was so cool to watch the magic happen in such a short period of time.

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I recently finished up the flexbox-zombies course to learn more about flexbox, and to become proficient with it. I can truly say that this course has changed the way that I create layouts. Flexbox is very intuitive now. What this course does really well at is explaining the concepts and hitting you with a ton of examples that you can work through really quickly.

A clip from the final round against Dave

Flexbox requires a wrapper container to work I will refer to this as the flex container, and the items in that container as items.

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I recently gave a presentation at the Big Brothers and Big Sisters Data Challenge. I wanted to use reveal to create my slides. I have used it before and it is a really nice package. Compared to PowerPoint it is much easier to incorporate interactive visualizations right into the presentation,easy to re factor and maintain slides. Since you are just working with text you can easily convert from a list of items on one slide to a set of slides.

If you have not seen David JP Phillips Death By PowerPoint TEDx, stop now and watch it. You will never look at slides the same again. Watching this video ruined me for watching presentations with these issues. Reveal is a tool that makes it very easy to follow these principles

In the video David talks about reducing the number of points we have down to no more than 6. You may be thinking “What No More than 6, Well I would have to have a hundred slides to get all of my point in”. to this David tells us, “The amount of slides in your PowerPoint has never been the problem. It is the amount of objects per slide that are the problem.”

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I Waylon S. Walker vow that from this point forward I will no longer create powerpoints to be considerec DEATH BY POWERPOINT

If you have not seen David JP Phillips Death By PowerPoint TEDx, stop now and watch it. You will never look at slides the same again. Watching this video ruined me for watching presentations with these issues. Reveal is a tool that makes it very easy to follow these principles

I currently work in a company that employs over 100K employees, and to this day I cannot recall a single presentation given where the slides did not violate the rules stated in David’s Talk. This year I am putting a stop to this starting with myself. I am starting a new job role in 2018 and there is no better time to make some drastic changes to my workflow than now. I expect there to be a few followers and many naysayers, but I dont care. I will employ the directives listed below.

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