5 Exploratory coding
This chapter covers
- Understanding how having a fast feedback loop makes you more productive
- Prototyping to explore our data and develop our understanding
- Starting prototyping with Excel
- Continuing prototyping with Node.js and the browser
- Setting up a live reload coding pipeline, where code changes automatically flow through to data and visual output
In this chapter, we’ll use exploratory coding to delve into your data and build your knowledge and understanding. We’ll use a small example data set that’s easy to understand, but in the real world the need to explore and understand our data grows with larger and larger data sets.
This chapter is a microcosm of the data-wrangling process. We’ll move through acquisition, then exploration and understanding, then analysis, and finally arrive at visualization. Our focus here though is on fast prototyping, with an emphasis on having a streamlined and effective feedback loop so that we can code quickly and see results immediately.
The output from the exploration phase of the data-wrangling process is
- An improved understanding of your data
- JavaScript code that’s potentially usable in production
5.1 Expanding your toolkit
In this chapter we’ll expand our data-wrangling toolkit in a number of ways. We’ll use Excel for initial prototyping and visualization. Once we reach the limits of Excel, we’ll move to Node.js for exploration and analysis and later still to the browser for visualization.