After years of learning and forgetting one technology after the other, I had almost given up on the life I would be living in the future. A sad, monotonous life spent making love to the computer screen in front of me. I dread the feeling.
I have never been one of the humongous crowd of self professed lovers of analytical powers. I have no clue how a balloon can fill a room or how I can fill a 5 L jug with a 3 L jug and frankly I don't and never did care. I never found writing code challenging or solving puzzles a way to feed my dying ego. I detested my job for lacking something that defines our very existence...color.
They say, there is music everywhere. I believe there is art everywhere, not just music. Notes and colors define why we exist. But sadly we never notice. We love gray and would be only too happy to go and waste ourselves in a sad depressing color. And then, about five years ago, I got pulled into the world of colorful data.
Data is perhaps the most interesting faucet of our lives, but like colors and notes, data gets ignored too. Sherlock Holmes, screams in desperation, "Data, data. I can not be expected to solve a case without Data." And today, data is recognized not just by individuals but also by large organizations as the primary source for influencing decisions. But what use is data that is gray?
And that is where the art of visualization comes in. Giving meaning to data, making it presentable and readable and painting numbers on the screens of users is perhaps a more tedious job than coding. When I started building my first dashboard, I was more frustrated than Picasso doing his first painting. The color combination, the background, the design and the look of the graphs and the charts was more tedious than I had ever imagined.
After several attempts and frustration, here is my first tangible attempt at a dashboard.
I have never been one of the humongous crowd of self professed lovers of analytical powers. I have no clue how a balloon can fill a room or how I can fill a 5 L jug with a 3 L jug and frankly I don't and never did care. I never found writing code challenging or solving puzzles a way to feed my dying ego. I detested my job for lacking something that defines our very existence...color.
They say, there is music everywhere. I believe there is art everywhere, not just music. Notes and colors define why we exist. But sadly we never notice. We love gray and would be only too happy to go and waste ourselves in a sad depressing color. And then, about five years ago, I got pulled into the world of colorful data.
Data is perhaps the most interesting faucet of our lives, but like colors and notes, data gets ignored too. Sherlock Holmes, screams in desperation, "Data, data. I can not be expected to solve a case without Data." And today, data is recognized not just by individuals but also by large organizations as the primary source for influencing decisions. But what use is data that is gray?
And that is where the art of visualization comes in. Giving meaning to data, making it presentable and readable and painting numbers on the screens of users is perhaps a more tedious job than coding. When I started building my first dashboard, I was more frustrated than Picasso doing his first painting. The color combination, the background, the design and the look of the graphs and the charts was more tedious than I had ever imagined.
After several attempts and frustration, here is my first tangible attempt at a dashboard.
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