Data Visualization (Viz)
San Diego has a much smaller tech community than San Francisco. When I lived in the Bay Area, each night I could choose from a dozen or so tech meetups and events that were both interesting and at my skill level — and that is only a fraction of what was available. Since San Diego is much smaller, I was really excited to join a new Data Viz meetup. Tonight was the first meeting and it did not disappoint.
The event featured lightening talks about best practices from a variety of speakers — a mining engineer, a business analyst, a software engineer and a financial analyst. Most of the speakers used Tableau or R + Shiny. I was surprised that no one spoke about D3. The variety of data and how the speakers determined the best way(s) to show the data and the thinking that went into those decisions, as well as the audience insights were quite insightful.
API’s…
I am about 2/3 of the way done with the Udacity API class. The latest lessons involved another new thing for me — an SQLite database with SQLAlchemy to store data from an API call. In school, we learned to use SQLAlchemy with PostGres (I like PostGres, I even have an elephant beanie baby named PostGres…) Anyway, using a different database with SQLAlchemy forced me to think first about the objective (create a new column or put data into a table) and then make an adjustment in the coding for SQLite.
Final Word
One of the most enjoyable non-tech parts of the meetup tonight was the people. The speakers and audience members were from Iran, India, Germany, China, Africa, and the US. Having people from all over the globe come together and share their knowledge is invaluable and one of the things I love the most about California.
michdcode 