HasGeek Hacknight From Pink Floyd to Pandas and Beyond

It was a marathon event this past Saturday, as developers from one-person startups to corporates gathered for a Data Visualization Hacknight organized by HasGeek in run up to next week’s event on big data – The Fifth Elephant. The day featured three tutorials – Sameer Segal talking about D3.js, Baan Bapat on R, S. Anand on Pandas. Keeping in mind the varying levels of familiarity with these tools among the audience, the speakers started with the basics, and made their way to complex implementations. After the sessions, many of the developers were heard saying they got what they came for – to network with like-minded peers, be on top of the new tools and trends, and discover new ways of using these tools in their projects.

The tutorials were followed by a final talk, in which our very own Pallav Nadhani took stage to talk about ‘Data Visualization for Business’. Speaking to a developer audience, he addressed implementation questions as asked by developers, but went beyond that, to talk about chart and dashboard design, and the very fundamentals of data visualization, that developers often overlook. With his experience heading FusionCharts over the past decade, he was able to speak about building dashboards being mindful of the kind of audience it’s meant for. His slides were a visual treat, chock full of examples, making it easy for the audience to grasp the concepts he was talking about. At the end of the talk many were curious about the FusionCharts story, our products, pricing, customer base, etc, which Pallav was happy to answer.

Here’s the deck that Pallav used in his talk:
[slideshare id=23943284&doc=fusionchartsdatavisualizationhacknight-130705080220-phpapp01&w=514&h=422]

Armed with all this learning and inspiration, the developers hacked all night, and came up with interesting projects the next morning, one of which we’ve included below. It’s a chart that plots the time duration of a million songs. The team noticed a visible spike in the 1963, and in fanboy frenzy concluded that Pink Floyd’s arrival on the music scene was the sole reason for it 🙂

Which of the pointers from Pallav’s deck are you most likely to apply to your dashboards and charts? Let us know in the comments.