streaming live from the browser
watch us make some visualizations
TUNE IN: I’m streaming some d3 mapping with Observable September 1st @ 10am PST
It’s been a little over a month since I joined Observable and I’ve got a few irons in a few fires already. The one I want to think a bit about today is live streaming and moving meetups online.
There are two streams I’m working on: Coding with Fire and Observable. I’ve learned a bit already from both, and feel like things are really getting interesting. At the same time we recently had a pretty awesome d3 meetup with hundreds of folks from all over the world.
It has me thinking, what is the difference between a stream and a meetup?
A key aspect to the success of the recent meetup was the active chat: folks shared the cities and countries they were tuning in from, questions were asked and answered and people shared their recent work. Chat is something that has been integral to the game streaming experience for a long time, and streaming about code and design is no exception.
A big draw for a meetup is both hearing from and having the opportunity to connect with the speakers. The recent d3 meetup had a pretty exceptional lineup with talks from Mike Freeman and Amelia Wattenberger and an AMA with Mike Bostock. Of course this made for a big moment, and the excitement showed up in the chat.
It helped that the everything about the event was made possible by fellow Observable colleague Wayne Sutton. Until now my experience as a meetup organizer was always in a hobby capacity, learning from someone who has professional experience bringing people together has been illuminating.
I’m also excited for streams like we are seeing from Shirley Wu, sharing her individual process. Anytime you watch you can see that Shirley is consistently creating a space for folks to connect and learn, not just with her but with each other too!
All this has given me some thoughts about streams as “venues” where events can happen, and am looking forward to trying it with some future d3 meetups.
Coding with Fire Stream
I really can’t talk about streaming without proper deference to my good friend EJ Fox. He is the producer, director and host of Coding with Fire.
Each stream we make something. We’ve gone in several different directions and each time it challenges my skills and my tools. EJ and I have been on the same vibe since we met at visual.ly and hacked on Tributary almost 10 years ago. Having a live-coding environment of Observable’s caliber finally enables us to explore the kinds of ideas we have in a way that’s interactive with folks who are tuned in.
I think it’s fun to do and entertaining because the dialogue we have is just as important to the outcome as the code. We can have a design discussion and try things out at almost the same time, which means we can also take in suggestions and challenges from people in the chat. We are continuously iterating on the format and subject matter, so be sure to tune in!
Observable Stream
Ive been humbled to stream alongside Anjana Vakil on the newly established Observable Twitch stream.
We’ve done one stream already and are doing another tomorrow on building d3 visualizations in Observable. It’s funny because the format of the stream is that I’m teaching Anjana how to make a particular d3 visualization, but I’m the one learning so much from working with her… clearly communicating highly technical content in a way that feels like fun is hard work. Near the end of the first stream it was so gratifying when we finally got a slick transition going on the scatter plot we built and the crowd cheered!
There’s going to be all kinds of cool stuff on the Observable stream soon. If you’ve been wanting to try Observable but are feeling in any way shy, Anjana also made an awesome set of tutorial videos to get you started.