FlowingData turned a decade last month. June 25 to be exact. Woo woo.
I had to buy hosting for some graduate school project in 2007, and it came with a free domain name. Looking for some variation of data flows, I settled on flowingdata.com. I used it as a sandbox for stray HTML pages, and then on some idle day when I didn’t want to write my dissertation, I setup WordPress. I wrote stuff. I rambled. I wrote about Flash. I shared things that I thought were interesting.
I initially didn’t set specific goals for the site, but I knew I didn’t want to be someone who critiqued charts all of the time. And I was way too inexperienced with visualization anyways. Who was I to judge – when I could barely step outside of the bounds of default plots in R? Visualizing data for a million people is very different from visualizing data for a few.
I decided FlowingData would be a happy place to highlight work I liked and a place I could put up my own stuff. It would be a place where people could see data was fun — enjoy it even — and then learn in the process. I learned too.
So not much changed in a decade. I hope to not change for many more years.
I thank my lucky stars that this is what I get to do for a living.
Thanks for reading. Thank you for supporting.
