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Mike Bostock

@ocks.org

2.8K followers 77 following 112 posts

Visualization toolmaker. Founder of Observable. Creator of D3. Former NYT Graphics. Pronounced BOSS-tock.

Posts Replies Media

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 16/09/2026

We’re improving the experience of individuals on Observable by no longer forcing everyone into a “team of one”. It’s tricky to simplify workspaces when you have users in every conceivable state! Here’s the flow we built, and you can read more here: observablehq.com/@observableh...

A flow chart showing the logic for Observable’s new user settings page; the flow branches initially for individuals with an existing personal workspace, individuals without a personal workspace, and teams; these branches branch again based on whether the team has more than one member and whether it is free.

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Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 16/09/2025

Observable Plot has crossed 100,000 weekly downloads (and very close to 5,000⭐️s)! observablehq.observablehq.cloud/oss-analytic...

A time-series chart shows daily downloads of Observable Plot from npm; downloads have grown from a couple thousand per day in October 2022 to about 15,000 per day in September 2025 (7-day moving average); a tooltip shows 20,229 downloads on September 10, 2025.

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Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 16/09/2025

If we keep adding languages, we’re gonna need a bigger cell menu…

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Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 16/09/2025

Observable Notebook Kit & Desktop 1.4 now support TypeScript cells, along with TypeScript for Node.js data loader cells. (Just type stripping, but greatly helps interoperability.)

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Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 11/09/2025

A small but significantly useful victory: I got file association working with Observable Desktop.

A screenshot of the macOS file info window, showing a file that will open with Observable Desktop by default.

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Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 10/09/2025

Observable Notebook Kit and Desktop 1.3.0 are out, featuring data loader cells. You can now (finally!!) write Python and Node.js in notebooks. 🐍 observablehq.com/notebook-kit...

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Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 29/08/2025

Observable Notebook Kit and Desktop 1.2.0 add Google BigQuery and Databricks database connectors! observablehq.com/notebook-kit...

A screenshot of querying the most frequent words in the works of Shakespeare, with a simple horizontal bar chart below.

A screenshot of querying a dataset of taxi trips in New York City, counting the number of trips per day, with a simple time-series bar chart below.

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Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 19/08/2025

A little demo of reactive SQL in Observable Notebooks 2.0, first using (native) DuckDB to bake data from a remote source, followed by DuckDB-Wasm to create and query reactive views in the client. Should be released this week!

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Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 03/08/2025

You can import a viewof in a vanilla JavaScript cell like this: import {figure, viewof$rotation} from "observable:@rreusser/drawing-3d-objects-with-svg"; I can look into the ojs syntax error, but definitely recommend adopting vanilla JavaScript wherever possible! Thanks for the write-up.

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Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 31/07/2025

Thanks for sharing, Nicolas! One tip, if you like you can use static imports in (vanilla) JavaScript cells now: import * as geoviz from "npm:geoviz";

A screenshot of Observable Desktop showing a JavaScript cell importing the geoviz library, followed by a JavaScript cell rendering a world map.

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Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 02/03/2024

I got a proof-of-concept self-hosted jsr: imports working, so we should be able to land this soon too! github.com/observablehq...

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