Mike Bostock

Observable now has a default `db` in every notebook powered by @duckdb.org (wasm) that lets you query over file attachments. No setup, no preamble, just query! observablehq.com/@observableh...

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.

I've got to say, Observable's AI assistant is a huge win for intitial exploratory data analysis / visualisation! If you know what you're looking for, it puts the wrangling and plot code together really well!! This was done in roughly 5 hours? (Note: data is experimental, for initial exploration)

We have some new interactive climate data visualizations through @observablehq.com at observablehq.com/@climatecent.... Hope they are useful, and feel free to share!

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-...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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/...

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...).

“Data viz” is short for “Data vizualisation”

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...

A reviver/replacer technique for dates in JSON that won’t silently corrupt your data. observablehq.com/@mbostock/th...

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...

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

We had a 9-minute outage earlier today caused by a database migration. Sorry! You can read more here: observablehq.com/@observableh...

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.

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?...

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...

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

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

I did a short interview with @observablehq.com about keeping visuals simple, clear, and easy to connect with. I also touched on curiosity, emotion, and what I’m still figuring out. Grateful for the conversation. 👇

🚨#datavis Job alert 🚨 Fancy working with us in London as a researcher using @observablehq.com Plot for accessible #datavis? To support people with language disability in the use of data visualization for everyday decision making. www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/about/jobs/a...

This week, the Bonus Drop features a practical example of using Python data loaders in Observable Notebooks 2.0. They enhance notebook performance by executing code in advance, facilitating access to diverse data formats. dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev/2025/09/14/b...

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

Big fan of @observablehq.com and since their preview release of Observable Notebooks 2.0 my team at Fora Health have integrated Notebook Kit into our app. Works really well so far. Quick demo ⬇️ screen.studio/share/TqvyfFbU

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...

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

Oops, seems I broke sign-in in yesterday’s Observable Desktop 1.1.0, but it should be fixed now in 1.1.1. Was it broken for you? Is it fixed now? Please give it a try and let me know. observablehq.com/notebook-kit...

📣 Today we’re announcing big updates in Observable Canvases. Learn about our growing suite of built-in, interactive charts (Sankey diagrams, arc maps, beeswarms + more), new embeds and dashboards for fast sharing, added Postgres and Databricks support, and more:

The Notebooks 2.0 gallery now has a dedicated page! observablehq.com/notebook-kit...

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!

I've been playing with the new Observable Notebooks 2.0 over the past days and I'm amazed. While still a preview I think it's already a serious alternative to R or Jupyter notebooks. Love that it works locally now and that notebooks are just HTML files with vanilla JS observablehq.com/notebook-kit/