[carls]

I'm a big fan of Observable, having used it to prototype and learn a number of different visualizations. Note that you don't just have to use D3, but can use other visualization libraries as well (i.e. Vega-Lite, Highcharts).

I also want to shout out Mike Bostock, one of the company founders (and creator of D3). I emailed him randomly to ask for some help with a d3 package and he replied the next morning.

Busy creators who nevertheless still make themselves available to engaging with the community always impress me!

[breck]

He responded to me too, almost a decade ago when I was first getting into the field and looking for mentors. He had some great tips too (basically which was to not do what I was doing privately emailing devs asking for mentorship and instead get involved with the public open communities on via GitHub, Stackoverflow, sharing demos, etc). Obvious advice in hindsight, but took me a while to internalize that.

[purplecats]

why is it obvious?

[jeffbee]

Bostock jumps into random Twitter threads to answer questions from Observable users. He's really helpful and generous.