About

(4 min reading time)

By the time I joined FreeCodeCamp I was focusing on improving my data analytics / data manipulation capabilities. I was learning javascript to get into D3.js, while expanding my existing abilities with Python.

While at Freecodecamp I wrote a couple of articles for their publication.

That was when I started getting an interest in writing articles with a technical content oriented to less technical audiences. I had a scientific writing background that didn’t match how the way people read on the Internet.

However, when writing articles my preferred topics were still those with a focus on data. But as any writer, if you were writing an article you would always have at least a wish that someone will find your post an interesting one. You usually write for other people to read, or at least if that is done in a publication, right?

Of course, no matter what you do with your article, content is King (or Queen, or Both, depending on your preferences). And well… simplicity is usually its best partner.

But even if that seems to be a golden rule for success, I most say that, in my personal experience, although the articles that explained something in an easy way found a place in my Bookmarks section, the ones that I remember more, the one I want to visit again, are those with the best, sometimes convoluted but well-thought graphics.

Mike Bostock blogs, some Kaggle reports, Tableau, FlowingData (here a fan!!), Visme, or the data journalism of Pudding (wauw!), Vox, The Guardian, New York Times, Forbes, Washington Post, Bloomberg, then specialized sites dedicated to things such as sport viz or maps, all together one or another losely but astonishing data viz “artist” here and there (Hans Rolling’s “200 Countries…”, Maarten Lambrechts, Nadieh Bremer, Christian Laesser, and more recently agencies like Clever°Franke)… some of them deliverying information in artistic way, full of interactivity and visuals.

I found that the world was not only D3.js, and learned about other similar libraries, then also the canvas API, Three.js and WebGl, Augmented Reality… I was also into Machine Learning, so R and all those visualization tools from Python… I then started using Jupyter frequently (the closest to storytelling I could get), and one of the first to register in Observable.

Meanwhile, I was publishing for FreeCodeCamp on Medium. And although by that time I already started to recognize the importance of content-over-form (yeah… not always the most beautiful sites are the most read), I still felt a bit dissapointed - I wanted to add more interactivity to what I wrote.

And as an “aprentice”, every time I read those articles my question has been the always the same: how do they manage to present that kind of articles in an appealing way while keeping the right balance between “art” and information?

…

Well… this is my very very very very humble attempt to get in the direction of those data geniuses. I have been after something like that for a while. For long time. Really: I can not stop coming back to those other sites and still not feeling impressed. They really left a mark on me.

But it won’t be an easy task, so let’s keep it simple and grow at our pace, right?

So what is this project about? (A sort of manifest)

The primary focus of this project is other people’s code and the idea is to take those scripts and evaluate them with a divulgative and educative purpose. This was a relatively easy decision. I have been involved with organizations that relate to e-learning. FreeCodeCamp, TechGrounds and more recently Winc Academy.

The project starts by focusing on the code, but it will come the time where I will write about composition, element selection, and things more related to the graphic designing of the project.

Now, because I want my posts to include more interactivity and animations than an standard post, writing the posts brings additional challenges.

One of the main challenges is on-time delivery. By the time of this update (08-2024) it could take me between 2 to 4 weeks to complete a post. Selecting the topic and then researching is about 15%-20% of the completion period. Writing the content might take probably two or three days. The viz take the rest.

If I would be thinking about monetizing from this project alone, well… the topics I am handling here might not be different to those written in much less time. It might take between one to five days to complete a full article about the same topic by skipping all the animations and using static images instead.

Even worst: I have to admit that my blogs are, in fact, well… a nice try.

Be aware that you should not expect astonishing posts as it is not the original intention of this project anyway, although it is in fact a concealed wannabe wish. This project is more a practical, standardized one, more in the same line as projects like Brilliant.org or Khan Academy if you want to find a better comparison.

However, this project faces a practical challenge: it is likely in the best case scenario that an article about the same topic written in less time will receive at least the same attention to one of mine that takes more time to finish.

That would be enough to think twice about the realization of this project. Despite of it, I have this “what if…” that prevent me to give this project up. My response to that challenge is a test of what I could do to finish the kind of articles that I like in a easier and quicker way.

So this is also a proof of concept right from the start. Admittedly, I don’t expect this to be the work of a master coder, UX/UI expert nor a writer. It is just responding that “what if…”. However, I am taking seriously the evolution of the project into something more “formal”, so expect thing such as improvements, automations, technology testing, or the insertion of best practices while the project evolves - however far it goes. And I will also comment about it too.

Technology selection

This project starts with the easiest picks first.

I am making use of jekyllrb.com minima and runs on github-pages. The reason for the selection was just convenience. I was looking for something that gave me the flexibility that I was looking for and jekyll was right there. I am aware that some people refer to jekyll as a “death framework walking” but, actually, I feel really comfortable with it. I might change it into something more modern in due time, but right now it was the most low-entry barrier framework.

I am also using other technologies, like scrollama to standardize the storytelling implementations. The same as jekyll, it feels easy. But as everything regarding this project, it might change.