Mike Bostock
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Mike Bostock
@ocks.org
2.6K followers 73 following 68 posts
Visualization toolmaker. Founder of Observable. Creator of D3. Former NYT Graphics. Pronounced BOSS-tock.
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Reposted by Mike Bostock
jwolondon.bsky.social
🚨#datavis Job alert 🚨

Fancy working with us in London as a researcher using @observablehq.com Plot for accessible #datavis?

To support people with language disability in the use of data visualization for everyday decision making.

www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/about/jobs/a...
Details | City St George's, University of London
Details of job vacancy at City St George's,, University of London
www.citystgeorges.ac.uk
September 17, 2025 at 12:38 PM
ocks.org
Observable Plot has crossed 100,000 weekly downloads (and very close to 5,000⭐️s)! observablehq.observablehq.cloud/oss-analytic...
A time-series chart shows daily downloads of Observable Plot from npm; downloads have grown from a couple thousand per day in October 2022 to about 15,000 per day in September 2025 (7-day moving average); a tooltip shows 20,229 downloads on September 10, 2025.
September 16, 2025 at 3:16 PM
ocks.org
Observable Notebook Kit & Desktop 1.4 now support TypeScript cells, along with TypeScript for Node.js data loader cells. (Just type stripping, but greatly helps interoperability.)
September 16, 2025 at 5:05 AM
Reposted by Mike Bostock
hrbrmstr.dev
This week, the Bonus Drop features a practical example of using Python data loaders in Observable Notebooks 2.0. They enhance notebook performance by executing code in advance, facilitating access to diverse data formats.

dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev/2025/09/14/b...
Bonus Drop #98 (2025-09-14): Observable Notebooks Data Loaders Example
This week, the Bonus Drop features a practical example of using Python data loaders in Observable Notebooks 2.0. Data loaders enhance notebook performance by executing code in advance, facilitating…
dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev
September 14, 2025 at 2:36 PM
ocks.org
A small but significantly useful victory: I got file association working with Observable Desktop.
A screenshot of the macOS file info window, showing a file that will open with Observable Desktop by default.
September 11, 2025 at 12:16 AM
Reposted by Mike Bostock
jamesking.io
Big fan of @observablehq.com and since their preview release of Observable Notebooks 2.0 my team at Fora Health have integrated Notebook Kit into our app. Works really well so far. Quick demo ⬇️

screen.studio/share/TqvyfFbU
Observable Notebooks 2.0 in Fora Health — Screen Studio
Observable Notebooks 2.0 in Fora Health — Created and shared with Screen Studio
screen.studio
September 9, 2025 at 2:28 PM
ocks.org
Observable Notebook Kit and Desktop 1.3.0 are out, featuring data loader cells. You can now (finally!!) write Python and Node.js in notebooks. 🐍 observablehq.com/notebook-kit...
September 10, 2025 at 3:21 AM
ocks.org
Observable Notebook Kit and Desktop 1.2.0 add Google BigQuery and Databricks database connectors! observablehq.com/notebook-kit...
A screenshot of querying the most frequent words in the works of Shakespeare, with a simple horizontal bar chart below. A screenshot of querying a dataset of taxi trips in New York City, counting the number of trips per day, with a simple time-series bar chart below.
August 29, 2025 at 4:09 PM
ocks.org
Oops, seems I broke sign-in in yesterday’s Observable Desktop 1.1.0, but it should be fixed now in 1.1.1. Was it broken for you? Is it fixed now? Please give it a try and let me know. observablehq.com/notebook-kit...
Observable Desktop | Observable
observablehq.com
August 28, 2025 at 3:26 PM
ocks.org
Observable Notebook Kit and Desktop 1.1 are out. Headline feature: database connectors! 🎉 You can now query DuckDB, SQLite, Postgres, and Snowflake directly from notebooks. And it’s self-hosted. And it saves results automatically for performance and stable analysis. observablehq.com/notebook-kit...
Observable Notebooks Database connectors | Observable
observablehq.com
August 27, 2025 at 2:04 PM
Reposted by Mike Bostock
observablehq.com
📣 Today we’re announcing big updates in Observable Canvases. Learn about our growing suite of built-in, interactive charts (Sankey diagrams, arc maps, beeswarms + more), new embeds and dashboards for fast sharing, added Postgres and Databricks support, and more:
Observable Canvases: New chart types, dashboards, and easier ways to share
Our biggest release yet for Observable Canvases is here with new chart types, support for internal embedding, and dashboard creation.
buff.ly
August 26, 2025 at 3:38 PM
ocks.org
The Notebooks 2.0 gallery now has a dedicated page! observablehq.com/notebook-kit...
Observable Notebooks 2.0 Gallery | Observable
observablehq.com
August 26, 2025 at 4:03 AM
ocks.org
A little demo of reactive SQL in Observable Notebooks 2.0, first using (native) DuckDB to bake data from a remote source, followed by DuckDB-Wasm to create and query reactive views in the client. Should be released this week!
August 19, 2025 at 11:43 AM
Reposted by Mike Bostock
driven-by-data.net
I've been playing with the new Observable Notebooks 2.0 over the past days and I'm amazed. While still a preview I think it's already a serious alternative to R or Jupyter notebooks. Love that it works locally now and that notebooks are just HTML files with vanilla JS observablehq.com/notebook-kit/
Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview | Observable
observablehq.com
August 2, 2025 at 10:26 AM
ocks.org
Notebooks 2.0 is here! 📓🔮 Previewing today:
Notebook Kit, an open file format for notebooks with open-source tooling for generating static sites; and
Observable Desktop, a macOS desktop application for editing notebooks as local files, with a radical new approach to AI. observablehq.com/notebooks/2/
Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview | Observable
observablehq.com
July 29, 2025 at 2:38 PM
Reposted by Mike Bostock
jwolondon.bsky.social
Want to create your own custom marks in @observablehq.com Plot, but don't want to go full D3?

I've created a guide with 6 approaches of varying sophistication for specifying reusable custom marks:

observablehq.com/@jwolondon/h...
A selection of custom marks generated with Observable Plot. From top to bottom: A categorical bar chart with black hachured patterns in 6 different directions; A faceted bar chart using Isotope symbols showing cattle, pigs and sheep in red, grey and blue; a sequence of geometric symbols in blue gradually increasing in size: circle, triangle, square and fan, repeating 3 times, below which is a sequence of 12 human-like figures also increasing in size; A curve made up of ellipses that transition from vertical to horizontal to cicrcular shapes; a set of thee dot and whisker symbols in black and white; an abstract geometric arrangement of teardrop shapes in green to brown colours forming concentric bands away from the bottom left; a map of cycle hire journeys in London represented by asymmetric curves in a range of colours, overlaid over the river Thames; a map on London boroughs symbolised with dots of varying density with the highest density of dots towards the outside, lowest in the centre; a 'chart' of flowers of different shades of purple and orange.
March 31, 2025 at 8:16 PM
Reposted by Mike Bostock
fil.rezo.net
AMA about my love of maps
observablehq.com/blog/maps-an...

thanks @allisonhorst.bsky.social for the cosy chat
We can always talk about maps
Fil Rivière, Data Visualization Engineer at Observable, describes his path into data visualization, what he likes in a map, what’s hard about mapmaking, and why he’s asking if we need a “slow cartogra...
observablehq.com
February 24, 2025 at 2:12 PM
Reposted by Mike Bostock
markmarkoh.bsky.social
The implementation of the waffle mark in @observablehq.com’s Plot library is a lot more elegant and clever than I thought it would be: open.substack.com/pub/commithi...

#javascript #dataviz
ep8 plot: waffle mark 🧇
Observable's data visualization library is full of fun little tricks, especially with this waffle mark commit
open.substack.com
November 19, 2024 at 2:25 PM
Reposted by Mike Bostock
fil.rezo.net
🎺 I always like how modest our release notes and version numbers are. But here’s the quack 🐤🐤🐤.

Observable Framework v1.13 — just released! — adds support for 🐤 DuckDB’s extensions 🐤 : SPATIAL, H3, VSS… you name it.

observablehq.com/framework/li...
DuckDB | Observable Framework
observablehq.com
November 13, 2024 at 4:46 PM
Reposted by Mike Bostock
fil.rezo.net
I was ★★ by this very simple and yet powerful interaction pattern that the NYT made on their election polls page; I knew I had to reproduce it. Lots of small details to figure out… now it's available as a reusable options transform for Observable Plot.
observablehq.com/@observableh...
September 24, 2024 at 3:22 PM
ocks.org
I am excited about (and proud of) Observable Framework 1.1. It features Windows support, self-hosted npm: imports, and CommonMark compatibility. And it’s just three weeks since launch! More to come.
Release v1.1.0 · observablehq/framework
Windows support (and Node 18, too) 🎉 Framework now supports Windows! Thank you upvoting #90. 👍 Framework internally uses POSIX path delimiters (forward slashes /), and now converts to the Windows p...
github.com
March 5, 2024 at 11:59 PM