Hobbies

Here I list a few of my hobbies. Note that this list is not extensive, and only contains the items I had time to list.

D3

D3 is a javascript library for visualizing data. See their website, https://d3js.org for more information.

Some small examples I have been playing with can be seen in my D3 sandbox.

US Trade Animation

An animation was created by Brightpoint, and their original creation can be seen here. I found this animation on the list of examples on the D3 examples gallary.

This was a very easy to understand and well thought out animation demonstrating the trade imbalance between imports and exports between 2001 and 2013 for the US. However, there are a few bugs in the animation, and in my efforts to learn D3, I downloaded their code and fixed them. The bugs I identified and fixed are the following:

  1. Tooltip information is mixed up
  2. Bars swap places with each other for no apparent reason
  3. bars do not dissappear and reappear as intended as nations get added and removed from the top 20 lists.

I performed two versions of my fix, a minimal one that continues to use D3 version 3 and a bigger fix, with styling refactoring, and uses D3 version 4. These versions can be seen at the following links:

You will see in both fixed versions, the bars will stay on the same country, but move around with the ranking that country takes. It is a much better visual representation of the changes in the rankings of US trade.

For those curious about what is different from the original to the minimal fix, minimal-fix.patch is the patch file specifying all of the things I changed.