Observable

What do you learn from coding an explanation by hand vs. with Claude? @rreusser.bsky.social has done a lot both ways; on the latest episode of our podcast, we compare one of each. Watch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7epn... Subscribe: observablehq.com/podcast

You can now follow users to see their latest notebooks in the “Following” feed on your homepage. You’ll also get an email when they publish something. And we’ve consolidated the personal and community navigation so you see everything on that left sidebar. observablehq.com/@observableh...

One thing we’re not planning to port from the old site is the Notion-style “add cell menu”. When introduced in 2022, the extra clicks caused friction and frustration, but many came to depend on it for enumerating possibilities. Today, with AI, it’s hard to justify such a list.

Original announcement x.com/observablehq... Example of past frustration github.com/observablehq... and new relief talk.observablehq.com/t/something-...

The agent can now read other notebooks, both public ones and your private ones. You can just paste a link, or create a collection called “Skills”; notebooks in a “Skills” collection get highlighted in the attachments menu. Here we demonstrate a very strict style guide.

After notebooks 1.0 (2018–), we got inspired by @stephango.com’s 2023 stephango.com/file-over-app, leading to Framework (2023) and then Notebook Kit (2025), upon which we rewrote the site. Still stitching it together: you can now download your notebooks and open them in the desktop app.

If you “Export JavaScript”, you can e.g. publish that module to npm and import it back to a notebook: import {hello} from "npm:example-observable-module" with {type: "observable"}; See observablehq.com/@observableh...

Julio has a charming Zoom background full of books. In today’s podcast we test at random whether he’s read them. YouTube: youtu.be/87iO4jUBa6M Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/5IjX... Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/j... RSS: feeds.transistor.fm/observable-p...

“Red Space”, @macwright.com riffing on geometrydaily.tumblr.com, 2019

Talking about getting more engaged with irl visualization event scene… talking about maintaining a calendar of events or something. Would that be helpful? Seems like @datavizsociety.bsky.social already has that well-covered: datavisualizationsociety.org/events/

getting more engaged *(again)

You can now configure databases observablehq.com/team/select?... and secrets observablehq.com/team/select?... within the new Observable. Paste a database URI in the “Host” field and it will populate all fields at once. Release notes: observablehq.com/@observableh...

Great investigation of a classic dataset. Observable bundles the similar (but later) “cars” dataset from the 1983 ASA Data Exposition, hosted here lib.stat.cmu.edu/datasets/ and described in lib.stat.cmu.edu/datasets/car....

We made *thousands* of charts of the “penguins” sample dataset — we could probably sketch many of them from memory — before we got any clue why Dr. Kristen Gorman had actually taken those measurements, and what it said about evolutionary pressures of change in sea ice extent due to climate change.

Great investigation of a classic dataset. Observable bundles the similar (but later) “cars” dataset from the 1983 ASA Data Exposition, hosted here lib.stat.cmu.edu/datasets/ and described in lib.stat.cmu.edu/datasets/car....

You can now create and manage teams in the new Observable, use Opus 5.5, connect to MySQL… but, most exciting, and by far the most overdue: you can now access SQL cells’ metadata fields by opening the cell menu with ⌃M. Keep those hands on that keyboard! observablehq.com/@observableh...

This has been an issue since we introduced SQL cells in 2021, & was exacerbated by later “UI cells”. Pressing tab inside the cell editor inserts spaces; pressing ⌥tab focuses the next cell. Somehow we never developed any keybinding for focusing controls outside the cell editor, “in-between” editors.