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vega / altair

Declarative statistical visualization library for Python
https://altair-viz.github.io/
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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Altair Hackathon? #367

Closed mroswell closed 6 years ago

mroswell commented 7 years ago

New to Altair, but enthusiastic. I'd like to propose the idea of an Altair Hackathon. I don't know the community well enough to organize it. But I imagine a day or weekend spending a large portion of the time developing more examples, and blog posts, along with the usual code base development and issue queue resolution. The API documentation is very concise, and more examples would help grow the user base.

A Google search for: 

how to put on a hackathon

yields some promising guides.

ellisonbg commented 7 years ago

Marjorie, HI! Are you thinking of an in person hackathon? Where are located?

On Wed, Aug 2, 2017 at 8:01 PM, Marjorie Roswell notifications@github.com wrote:

New to Altair, but enthusiastic. Also struggling a bit. I'd like to propose the idea of an Altair Hackathon. I don't know the community well enough to organize it. But I imagine a day or weekend spending a large portion of the time developing more examples, and blog posts, along with the usual code base development and issue queue resolution. The API documentation is very concise, and more examples would help grow the user base.

A Google search for:

how to put on a hackathon

yields some promising guides.

— You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/altair-viz/altair/issues/367, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AABr0BU2vBCx3v3G6s1S7JFcO7-LP2Uwks5sUTgCgaJpZM4Or5id .

-- Brian E. Granger Associate Professor of Physics and Data Science Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo @ellisonbg on Twitter and GitHub bgranger@calpoly.edu and ellisonbg@gmail.com

mroswell commented 7 years ago

Yes, thinking of an in-person hackathon. I'm in Baltimore, but I could hop on a plane... later in the year. I can imagine giving people a chance to work on datasets and visualize them, and then see where people run into trouble, and make a big issue queue just from documenting people's barriers. And where people have success, create a repo of examples. The more examples the better. Maybe making a visual guide to terminology. Lots of possible things to do at an Altair hackathon :)

ADDENDUM (with some new ideas) - We could make some videos including some really geeky ones, like modifying one configuration parameter at a time so the viewer can see what it effects. Maybe an interactive slide deck, too, so that people can easily present Altair at local meetups.

jheer commented 7 years ago

This is a lovely idea, and I have resources to help support it -- including hosting an event at UW in Seattle. Something to revisit once Vega-Lite 2.0 & Altair 2.0 are released!

ellisonbg commented 7 years ago

An Altair/Vega event in Seattle at UW would be wonderful (direct flight from SLO). I also have money I can contribute to make it happen. Marjorie, thanks for the idea!

On Fri, Aug 4, 2017 at 10:43 PM, Jeffrey Heer notifications@github.com wrote:

This is a lovely idea, and I have resources to help support it -- including hosting an event at UW in Seattle. Something to revisit once Vega-Lite 2.0 & Altair 2.0 are released!

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jakevdp commented 7 years ago

Great idea! @craigcitro might also be interested – He's at Google Seattle and has been making use of Altair within their internal stack.

craigcitro commented 7 years ago

I would absolutely be interested -- when are you thinking?

mroswell commented 7 years ago

Will leave that now to the host @ellisonbg to schedule :) (That said, I'm not free the first two weekends in September or the first two weekends in November. I'll come back here and update if nothing has developed before my schedule comes into further focus.)

UPDATE: Also, September 30 is Yom Kippur, so best not to hold it on that date.

nipunbatra commented 7 years ago

A Hackathon is a great idea.

I spent some time (mentioned on another issue) on replicating 50 R plots in Altair and made this repo.

I have also been spending some time on Stack Overflow, suggesting Altair usage where Pandas/MPL/Seaborn examples require a lot of code.

  1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39702338/2d-scatter-chart-matplotlib/44941171#44941171
  2. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28033046/matplotlib-scatter-color-by-categorical-factors/44940984#44940984
  3. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23085852/scatter-plot-with-hues-in-matplotlib/44940969#44940969
  4. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9310987/scatter-plot-with-scalar-data/44940926#44940926
  5. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43728708/python-how-to-create-scatterplots-of-fixed-ranges-across-several-intervals/44940156#44940156
  6. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33150510/how-to-create-groupby-subplots-in-pandas/44940024#44940024
  7. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44595288/matplotlib-adding-legend-based-on-existing-color-series/44939869#44939869
  8. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22787209/how-to-have-clusters-of-stacked-bars-with-python-pandas/44939252#44939252
  9. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36630771/group-bar-chart-with-seaborn-matplotlib/44939093#44939093

I learnt a lot through these exercises. It also helped me understand the cases where Altair excels, and cases where we might need to wait till version 2.0.

jakevdp commented 7 years ago

September is out for me, but the rest of the fall is pretty open. Also, the likelihood of me being able to participate on a weekend goes way down: childcare is only available during the week.

ellisonbg commented 7 years ago

I am guessing that the October timeframe would work well. Let's see how the new releases end up landing and go from there. Cheers, Brian.

On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 7:39 AM, Jake Vanderplas notifications@github.com wrote:

September is out for me, but the rest of the fall is pretty open. Also, the likelihood of me being able to participate on any given weekend goes way down: childcare is only available during the week.

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-- Brian E. Granger Associate Professor of Physics and Data Science Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo @ellisonbg on Twitter and GitHub bgranger@calpoly.edu and ellisonbg@gmail.com

kanitw commented 7 years ago

FYI, Vega-Lite team will be out of town Oct 1-6 for VIS conference and will be in Thailand Oct 18 - Nov 6. So somewhere between Oct 9-17 or after Nov 6 would work better for me.

craigcitro commented 7 years ago

Also adding @doug, in case he's thinking about a trip back stateside. :)

mroswell commented 7 years ago

Given that the hackathon scheduling seems to depend on it: I've been trying to figure out the timeline for the release of Vega-Lite 2.0. Is this "2.0.0 Critical Issues for Release" tag all that stands between a 'beta' and the 2.0 release? https://github.com/vega/vega-lite/milestone/22 And then how far after that does Altair 2.0 come out?

I guess the bigger question is: How likely are we to actually meet, on say, October 13-14 (I included a Friday in this proposed schedule, to include Jake.) That's 9 weeks away.

domoritz commented 7 years ago

October 13-14 works for me.

jakevdp commented 7 years ago

October 13-14 works for me.

me as well

ellisonbg commented 7 years ago

I have kid commitments Oct 7-14. Any time in Oct after that would work. Looking at the other schedules posted above, maybe Oct 16/17 would work?

On Sat, Aug 12, 2017 at 12:05 PM, Jake Vanderplas notifications@github.com wrote:

October 13-14 works for me.

me as well

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mroswell commented 7 years ago

I'm thinking one weekend day would get a few more attendees. Maybe October 15/16? (That's a Sunday/Monday pair that doesn't seem to trigger any of the unavailable days mentioned above.) I like the idea of inviting lots of folks to learn how to use Altair--and documenting what their challenges are... and developing training videos in response... as part of the hackathon. My guess is that those unlikely-to-make-core-commit folks would welcome a weekend day. @ellisonbg : Would that work?

craigcitro commented 7 years ago

Oct 5-10 is out for me, but I'm mostly free after that.

I won't be able to make a weekend day at all (all weekend days are kid commitments 😁).

mroswell commented 7 years ago

@ellisonbg it would be good to nail down dates for this. Since you're hosting, it's your call.

UPDATE: Oops, sorry, I reread the thread. @jheer is hosting. @jheer can you nail down the dates on this?

doug commented 7 years ago

Any chance it could be between Oct 1st and Oct 6th? If not would love to grab dinner one night and chat about altair if people are around.

On Wed, Sep 13, 2017 at 10:09 PM, Marjorie Roswell <notifications@github.com

wrote:

@ellisonbg https://github.com/ellisonbg it would be good to nail down dates for this. Since you're hosting, it's your call.

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domoritz commented 7 years ago

That’s during the infovis conference and the Vega-Lite folks will be out of town.

mroswell commented 7 years ago

I'm unable to commit at this point. Not being able to nail down a date is making general life scheduling difficult.

domoritz commented 7 years ago

@jakevdp @ellisonbg @kanitw Should we do October 16/17?

ellisonbg commented 7 years ago

I could make Oct 16/17, if the UW folks are around. Sorry about the scheduling delays, I was supposed to move into a new house months ago, and it has gotten pushed back to late Oct, making all travel difficult to schedule. What other folks could make those days?

On Sun, Sep 17, 2017 at 9:46 PM, Dominik Moritz notifications@github.com wrote:

@jakevdp https://github.com/jakevdp @ellisonbg https://github.com/ellisonbg @kanitw https://github.com/kanitw Should we do October 16/17?

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jakevdp commented 7 years ago

Sorry, I've been on parental leave and not really keeping up with things like email and github.

Oct 16-17 should work for me.

mroswell commented 7 years ago

October 16-17 will work for me. (I just want to be sure it's happening before I buy tickets.)

jakevdp commented 7 years ago

Sounds like we have a quorum for Oct 16/17, I'll go ahead and reserve space at the eScience institute.

mroswell commented 7 years ago

Yay!

ellisonbg commented 7 years ago

Sounds great! I will purchase my plane tickets.

On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 9:08 AM, Marjorie Roswell notifications@github.com wrote:

Yay!

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jakevdp commented 7 years ago

OK, meeting room at UW eScience is reserved on the 16th/17th. Do you think we should publicize the event, or just do word-of-mouth to folks we think might be interested?

mroswell commented 7 years ago

My sense is that publicizing would be a good idea, even helping as a reminder for the people connected enough by word of mouth. If the result of promotion is that you get some non-advanced coders, you can set people on the tasks of making videos while following documentation, or just testing documentation and noting where there are issues.

Hmm... Is there a way to set up an environment so that people who don't already have docker skills or conda/pandas installation and command line skills can run it? If so, that would help to not waste skilled coders' time in helping others get up to speed (allowing the newbies to get started straightaway making videos, test documentation). Given the weekday schedule, probably not a huge number of folks will attend, but I think it would help to have some sort of web page, and an email (if you have a list)

Can you share the address or the UW eScience room? Parking directions?

jakevdp commented 7 years ago

I'll put together a quick info page on the github pages site. Probably not until tomorrow or Friday

mroswell commented 7 years ago

I found this contact page, including map links: http://escience.washington.edu/about-us/visit-us/

The address: 3910 15th Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98195

The Airport Code: Seattle/Tacoma International (SEA)

ghost commented 7 years ago

Hi! To confirm, is this open to folks who haven't contributed to Altair or Vega-Lite before? I'm based in Seattle and would like to participate.

mroswell commented 7 years ago

@cmsetzer, I'm not the host, but as the originator of this hackathon idea, yes, by all means! And bring your friends!

@jakevdp, I guess I'm the official nudge :) Can you create the promised web page? Maybe also include a list of ideas for technical and not-too-technical roles. (I posted some ideas early in the thread)

I'm flying in for this... look forward to meeting everyone. I expect to test out documentation, while recording videos. What works, what doesn't work? How does changing various parameters effect a chart.

It might be good to have some sample datasets.

I'm not too familiar with binder that was mentioned on another thread. (I'm guessing it can't be used on a private GitHub repo?) If there are any accounts we should get before coming to the hackathon, might be good to mention that on the page.

So, a summary of suggestions for the web page:

My goals are to:

ellisonbg commented 7 years ago

I have created a wiki page for us to use in organizing the event. Please have a look and help out with content.

https://github.com/altair-viz/altair/wiki/Altair-Hackathon,-October-2017

jakevdp commented 7 years ago

Thanks @ellisonbg!

Sorry for being so slow on this. As of today, I'm no longer caring for a 5-month-old full-time, so I should be more responsive :smile:

ellisonbg commented 7 years ago

I will be around later this afternoon if you want to chat about the 1.2.1 release

On Mon, Oct 9, 2017 at 8:28 AM, Jake Vanderplas notifications@github.com wrote:

Thanks @ellisonbg https://github.com/ellisonbg!

Sorry for being so slow on this. As of today, I'm no longer caring for a 5-month-old full-time, so I should be more responsive 😄

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-- Brian E. Granger Associate Professor of Physics and Data Science Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo @ellisonbg on Twitter and GitHub bgranger@calpoly.edu and ellisonbg@gmail.com

mroswell commented 7 years ago

@ellisonbg This page: https://github.com/altair-viz/altair/wiki/Altair-Hackathon,-October-2017 looks pretty-well-fleshed out!

Does anyone want to turn that into a non-editable website? Or leave it at that? Anyone have a list to share it with? I'll see you next week (so far, 5 of us). Looking forward.

(And what should we know about the 1.2.1 release?)

ellisonbg commented 7 years ago

For something this small, I don't think it is worth putting up a separate page. Not opposed if someone wants to though...

Jake and I are working on the 1.2.1 release this week, probably can have it ready by then.

On Mon, Oct 9, 2017 at 1:54 PM, Marjorie Roswell notifications@github.com wrote:

@ellisonbg https://github.com/ellisonbg This page: https://github.com/altair-viz/altair/wiki/Altair-Hackathon,-October-2017 looks pretty-well-fleshed out!

Does anyone want to turn that into a non-editable website? Or leave it at that? Anyone have a list to share it with? I'll see you next week (so far, 5 of us). Looking forward.

(And what should we know about the 1.2.1 release?)

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/altair-viz/altair/issues/367#issuecomment-335284551, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AABr0GwEyMmzUpjbYg4kFiIpY4tlPcnKks5sqof3gaJpZM4Or5id .

-- Brian E. Granger Associate Professor of Physics and Data Science Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo @ellisonbg on Twitter and GitHub bgranger@calpoly.edu and ellisonbg@gmail.com

mroswell commented 7 years ago

I'm not sure why this sentence appeared in the description of this event: "While no particular experience is needed to attend, this event is focused on current and potential developers, rather than users." Honestly, the reason I proposed the hackathon is that I perceived a gap between the power of the software and the usability of the very concise documentation. User participation strengthens development (my view, anyhow). I don't quite have the courage to delete the sentence (and we're less than 24 hours out, so it wouldn't impact much). I just think the event (and the software in general) would be stronger with a little more of a user-centric focus.

Anyhow, excited to meet and work with everyone, and learn more about 2.0. I read and write code, but I think I'll have the most capacity to be useful by trying to help fill that documentation gap (between super-concise API documentation and how to actually apply it).

mroswell commented 7 years ago

I added a page to the wiki:

(I'm on an excruciatingly slow WiFi on a plane, so the page is starting out sparse. Started with some JSON Schema information and a JSON Expression Tester, in case they turn out to be handy.)

kanitw commented 7 years ago

@ellisonbg @jakevdp For lunch, should we plan to all go somewhere together?

domoritz commented 7 years ago

@mroswell Thanks! I added some more links for the new schema and some related projects.

jakevdp commented 7 years ago

the reason I proposed the hackathon is that I perceived a gap between the power of the software and the usability of the very concise documentation

@mroswell: part of the reason for that gap is that a year ago, with Vega-Lite 2.0 imminent (or so I thought) I decided to delay investing in documentation until the Altair 2.0 release. Once Altair 2.0 is released, I do plan to invest a significant amount of time in docs. Unfortunately, it's not quite there yet, so we'll do our best with what we have in the next two days!

mroswell commented 7 years ago

Yay, all! Was a delight to spend time with everyone. Would love to see a wrap-up posted here. I'll start:

craigcitro commented 7 years ago

I was already bummed I couldn't make it -- but I also missed out on pupusas?! 😭

🎉 on the 1.2.1 release!

domoritz commented 7 years ago

@craigcitro I'm happy to meet to get pupusas for lunch! When do you want to go?

jakevdp commented 7 years ago

I also am interested in pupusas.

craigcitro commented 7 years ago

Current plan is Nov 6 for pupusas.