DataViz Thoughts: The Flashback Blog

3 min readOct 18, 2020

Year 1 Recap

During the past year-plus, I had the opportunity to chat with some of the most fascinating people in our community. Many of the people that I interviewed were selected because they greatly inspired me. DataVizThoughts will embark on Year 2 of interviews and weekly (ish)blogs (after a massive blog post planned for November). (1)

Stats and Stuff

Covering 39 posts, we had 15,876 readers or 407 visitors per post. We interviewed 22 people and had three guest posters. We have 135 followers on here, but they are very special to me because many created a Medium account just to follow the blog. The Top-5 posts were: “An Interview with Judit Bekker”, “Thank You DataFam”, “Datafam and Analytics Community Thanks You”, “An Interview with Pradeep Kumar G”, and “An Interview with Abisola Oni”. In all, there were 20 feature interviews. We also had three incredible guest posters from Zach Bowders and Priya Padham covering their 1st Viz of the Day and Sedale McCall providing a super post on successfully taking and passing his Tableau Desktop Specialist exam.

The biggest honor of this humble blog is that the community nominated it twice by the community as ‘Best Blog’ by the community in 2019 and 2020.

The Vizzies ‘Best Blog’ nominations of 2019 and 2020

Here is the remaining list of interviews (in alpha order). They are some of the best people I am honored to know — some have become some of my best friends and these interviews work because of their passion to share their stories as they have been inspired from others who had before them. Please check out each one as time permits — I was a superfan of these community members before and it’s since been elevated.

Other blogs focused on community thoughts, personal vizzes, and a couple of tutorials. Many may wonder why I focused on interviews, and not a larger focus on viz processes or tutorials. (2) I’m a curious person and wanted to find a way to connect with people I really admired. Having a format gave me the opportunity to have that and share it with the community. It forced me to try to work on people/networking skills I did not have or try to elevate before and make a ton of new friends in the process. In short, my desire to share stories overwhelmed my desire to brand myself… and I’m great with that!

In the past few months, I’ve been very fortunate to have Priya Padham work with me as a co-editor. She is not only a design influencer, but she’s also a talented editor and elated she is blogging for the data school as she is so great at connecting and inspiring. Although I’m her mentor, she’s become my collaborator, and am incredibly proud of her.

Call to action

Whose stories do you want to be covered in the next series? What else would you like to see from this blog? Please let me know on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Music Morsel

Cat Power is great. This is one of my favorites of hers. Give it a listen.

Binge Bite

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (the film) was released when I was a about five months old. The one person in the film that always intrigued me was Nurse Ratched. Here we get her back story, great acting, and a fun ride. Check it out.

Footnote

I want you to blog with me. Let’s work together to create a good news blog sharing your stories and inspirations from 2020. Here is the form!
My favorite tutorial blogs in no particular order are: Tableau Magic, FlerlageTwins, VizArtPandey, Data + Science, Information Lab Blog & VizJockey.