preface

Back in 2017, I was working as a frontend developer and found myself yearning for my next professional step. Although I enjoyed developing websites, something was missing. I was looking to bridge my background in engineering and my love for teaching with my new coding skills. That’s when my partner suggested I have a look at data visualization. For some reason, he thought I’d enjoy exploring this booming field. When I googled “data visualization,” I stumbled upon the project Data Sketches (www.datasketch.es) by Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu. Like so many others, I was deeply inspired and knew I had to learn how to build such projects. That's when I discovered a library called D3.js that they used to create their work.

I started to learn D3 here and there, subscribing to courses and reading blog posts. But my frustration kept growing as I discovered that many of the code snippets I was learning were outdated. I was confused by the lack of a straightforward step-by-step approach to learning and building D3 projects. When the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the world went into shutdown, I finally had time to sit down and start building my first projects. Slowly, the philosophy behind D3 began to make sense and became more and more intuitive.