iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 23/09/2026

This post giving strong emission theory vibes. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissio...

en.wikipedia.org

Emission theory (vision) - Wikipedia

100

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 22/09/2026

A common pattern for SaaS but not good for community!

021

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 22/09/2026

I love seeing all the cool notebooks people are sharing again!

020

Reposted by Mike Bostock

Observable @observablehq.com · 22/09/2026

Pack four mirrored spheres inside the four walls of a tetrahedron (a pyramid). Paint the walls red, green, blue, and white. Then shoot rays out of your eyes. As they bounce, you find that the regions colored each color all somehow share a coastline. observablehq.com/@nxrix/wada-...

3156

Reposted by Mike Bostock

Jo Wood @jwolondon.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Want to embed your @observablehq.com notebook cells in a Powerpoint-style presentation? I've created a tutorial and an interface to reveal.js that allows web-sharable interactive Observable cells to be embedded in full screen presentations. observablehq.com/@jwolondon/o...

Example slide with a pale cream background from a presentation that uses slideshow.

The slide shows a large square labelled 'Camden' in its bottom-left corner and five rows of small squares forming 15 horizontal bars aligned from the right of the large square. Each set of three rows shows a pale colour and sometimes darker colour in green, red, orange, blue and cyan from top to bottom. They represent political parties Greens, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Conservative and Reform respectively. To the right adjacent to the three orange bars are text labels saying 'alphabetically first within party', 'alphabetically second within party' and 'alphabetically third within party'. These form part of a visual explanation of the chart. Below the square and annotation is a legend across the slide width relating each of the colours to the political parties and 'unelected / elected' labels above the pale and darker version of each colour.

0175

Reposted by Mike Bostock

Bryce @brycemecum.com · 18/09/2026

TIL the new SQL cells on Observable support not just databases but variables defined in your notebook _and_ they output Arrow Tables which can be fed back into SQL cells: observablehq.com/@amoeba/sql-.... Nice.

observablehq.com

261

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 19/09/2026

You can implement your own custom DatabaseClient, too; it’s just an object with a sql method (that typically returns a promise to an Arrow.Table). observablehq.com/d/1ab5adcc5f...

observablehq.com

110

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 19/09/2026

Thanks for sharing! This feature uses DuckDB-Wasm under the hood. Here’s the equivalent using DuckDBClient, which is handy if you want to join multiple datasets. observablehq.com/d/aff4d0e2c2...

observablehq.com

120

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 17/09/2026

Nice! Were you inspired by our open-source analytics Framework project? observablehq.github.io/oss-analytics/

observablehq.github.io

Open-source analytics

120

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 16/09/2026

(The flow chart was built in a notebook, naturally. And the internal version labels every edge with counts queried from our data warehouse so we know exactly how frequently each case occurs!)

040

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.

1112

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 04/09/2026

We haven’t shipped search for the new Observable yet, but the old one is still available here old.observablehq.com/search

old.observablehq.com

Search | Observable

110

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 03/09/2026

Thank you for sharing your amazing work with us!

010

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 02/09/2026

Yep, thanks for trying it out, Ricky! We always love to see your notebooks. The free tier gives fairly limited tokens but soon you will be able to upgrade to Pro for more.

010

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 02/09/2026

Thank you Mattias! Reach out if you want any help, or to tell us more about your experience.

110

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 02/09/2026

It’s been pretty painless so far! And we’re glad to move beyond the JSON era. The only issue I recall is that the Databricks driver doesn’t yet support query parameters but we worked around that by doing SQL escaping ourselves.

030

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 02/09/2026

The new programmatic file attachment API is pretty cool and also powers our new fetch caching. observablehq.com/@observableh...

observablehq.com

041

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 02/09/2026

Our data connectors are serverless Vercel functions. We stream Arrow IPC back to the client, using Flechette on the client to read tables. The client also automatically saves query results to the notebook. observablehq.com/@observableh...

observablehq.com

251

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 02/09/2026

This quickstart describes pretty much what we do. We pass the relative path to the desired driver (e.g., ./path/to/libadbc_driver_snowflake.dylib). arrow.apache.org/adbc/current...

arrow.apache.org

Quickstart

Here we’ll briefly tour basic features of ADBC with JavaScript using the SQLite driver for Node.js. Installation: Installing Drivers: See Installing Drivers for instructions on installing ADBC driv...

250

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 01/09/2026

It’s finally here! So excited to be working out in the open again and for you all to try the new Observable. bsky.app/profile/obse...

16415

Reposted by Mike Bostock

Observable @observablehq.com · 01/09/2026

For more than a year, we’ve been quietly building an all-new Observable. Today, that new Observable is live on observablehq.com. Read Mike @ocks.org’s announcement: observablehq.com/@observableh...

A screenshot of the new Observable interface, showing a notebook visualizing “Bollinger bands”. Several interface elements are labeled. Along the top: workspace menu, new notebook button, user menu. Along the right side: file attachments, dependencies, comments, settings, enable tinkering, show AI. In the interior: cell inserter, cell menu, cell toolbar.

16115

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 31/08/2026

Plot’s API is extensible with custom marks, channels, data transforms, render transforms, all expressed with code (D3 or DOM API etc.) so agents can readily move to lower-level abstractions as needed. Needs more documentation, though. E.g. observablehq.com/@observableh...

observablehq.com

Plot: LeBron James’ shots

A recreation of Matt Stiles’ and Mitchell Thorson’s basketball shot charts in Observable Plot, demonstrating a custom mark to render the court markings. Based on work by Nicholas Ortenzio. The bin tra...

010

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 05/08/2026

Yep, it’s a completely different approach. Rather than compiling TypeScript to JavaScript before parsing, we now parse the TypeScript directly and then erase type annotations.

111

Reposted by Mike Bostock

Observable @observablehq.com · 13/07/2026

Here @fil.rezo.net reproduces @climatecasino.net’s chart, using warped gridlines to represent both the absolute temperature and the deviation from the historical mean for each day of the year. new.observablehq.com/@fil/godzill...

A line chart with an x-axis showing days of the year, from start of January to end of December; a left y-axis showing temperature, from 22 to 31 ºC; and a right axis showing deviation, from -3σ to 4σ. An orange line shows the mean, starting the year around 26.3 ºC and peaking in May around 27.8 ºC. Faint blue lines show a huge amount of historical data. A bold red line representing 2026 begins the year below the mean, just below 26 ºC, and continues to present day far above the mean, 29.4 ºC. Gray gridlines get “pinched” in the middle, representing narrower summer deviations, highlighting that the current temperature is almost 3.5σ above the mean.

25523

Reposted by Mike Bostock

Observable @observablehq.com · 05/07/2026

Revisiting this is a great idea by @thelatentspace.bsky.social, and it sent @toph.me down a rabbit hole: when you fill in all the years in-between, you get a lot of self-intersection. new.observablehq.com/@tophtucker/...

0113

Reposted by Mike Bostock

Posit @posit.co · 09/06/2026

Mike Bostock's first data viz library ran on three 1x1 pixel GIFs and raw HTML tables. It kind of made a bar chart. He went on to build D3. Listen now on Spotify (open.spotify.com/episode/01BJ...) and Apple Podcasts (podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...).

2428

Reposted by Mike Bostock

Observable @observablehq.com · 03/06/2026

“Data viz” is short for “Data vizualisation”

1203

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 29/05/2026

I am surprised that Fetch doesn’t yet have a way to track upload progress — you have to go back (20+ years) to XMLHttpRequest! There’s a nice observer proposal linked here though. jakearchibald.com/2025/fetch-s...

jakearchibald.com

Fetch streams are great, but not for measuring upload/download progress

They're inaccurate, and there are better ways.

1221

Reposted by Mike Bostock

Observable @observablehq.com · 20/05/2026

In this notebook, @laotzunami.bsky.social visualizes a state space of possible chart types and transitions among them along defined edges. Transitions between unconnected types are achieved by routing through intermediate types. observablehq.com/d/3c8b082818...

212627

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 12/05/2026

Seems like something D3 could help with!

030

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 11/05/2026

Latest podcast includes a sneak preview of new AI for notebooks!

050

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 02/05/2026

liking your tweet from my phone

010

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 02/05/2026

Hey, we’re working on distributing audio via podcast mechanisms, we just haven’t learned how to do it yet, lol. We’ll figure it out soon.

110

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 02/05/2026

Thanks, and yes! It’s been convenient to use Discourse for forums but I’ve always wished notebooks could be more seamlessly woven into discussions, and likewise the discussions integrated into the main site and more discoverable. It’s a lot to do but we’ll make it better.

010

Reposted by Mike Bostock

Jo Wood @jwolondon.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

A reassuring podcast. Good to see the value of community recognised. This seems strongly aligned with what notebooks are best at - communication between people, using computation and vis as support. Increasing prominence of infrastructure like forums and trending notebooks would help here too.

231

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 02/05/2026

Thanks Tom! Definitely quality over quantity… Rage against complexity. Nothing makes me happier than deleting code.

010

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 01/05/2026

In this week’s Observable Podcast, co-CEO Julio and I discuss our mission to make computation easier for humans to use and understand. We need a better medium! youtu.be/0uBOL9NP8Iw?...

youtu.be

What even is Observable? | Observable Podcast

YouTube video by Observable

4161

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 26/04/2026

Yeah it’s more a vlog than a podcast I guess? I don’t know how well it plays audio-only, but we can look into syndicating via RSS to all the apps.

020

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 25/04/2026

Thanks for the encouragement! Is there an easy way to do that with YouTube? You can subscribe to us there.

100

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 24/04/2026

Episode one of the Observable Podcast! Wherein @toph.me and I chat reactivity, mistakes in designing Observable JavaScript, and vanilla JavaScript in Notebooks 2.0. www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUh5...

youtube.com

Reactivity in vanilla JavaScript | Observable Podcast

YouTube video by Observable

2252

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 24/04/2026

I dunno how to setup RSS from YouTube, but you can subscribe there and there’s also a playlist. Thanks for your interest! www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

youtube.com

Observable Podcast - YouTube

The weekly podcast on all things Observable!

110

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 23/04/2026

Something like RBAC?

200

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 19/04/2026

Episode zero of the new Observable Podcast! Wherein @toph.me and I discuss the magic of Next.js. youtu.be/B2BFi3SyQM4

youtu.be

Does Next.js have too much magic? | Observable Podcast

YouTube video by Observable

2120

Mike Bostock @ocks.org · 19/04/2026

‎apps/web/src/app/(app)/@sidebar/[at]/page.tsx how many “app”s can i put in a single path

050