Ok, so this a very brief post about how the sausage gets made, but I need it to test what I am doing, and some of you nerds might actually want to do this too.
So its not really worth getting into all the details here, but I have been trying to figure out for a while how I can get interactive visualizations onto this blog. After all, if it's a data science blog, we need to be able to see the data in a fun informative way. Oh, the other caveat is, I am totally cheap and didn't want to pay for my blog to be hosted.
I finally nailed it, thanks https://www.pythonanywhere.com, which lets you host small flask (or django apps) for free, plus does all the work to make them run-able web-apps. Man, this is cool!
So check this out. I have a flask app, running a simple D3 visualization, imbedded it in an iframe on my blog. Success! Of course, this graphic doesn't "say" anything, it's a place holder for another post I have been working on for the last few weeks.
One other thing. About 2 years ago, I was in grad-school fighting with R every day. I literally thought I would never be able to do anything like this, and the only way I would every know how to make interactive graphics was Tableau, and hosting anything on the web would be nearly impossible.
Now, I can spend a night of hacking, and sitting on the shoulders of other programmers who have put together such great tools that this is a couple of hours of leisure time.
There's good reason for this. Grad-school taught me to go deep, and I was afraid to test things out if I didn't think I could become an expert in them, which it totally appropriate for research. Also, the ability to go super deep is a skill I am glad I have. But there is also a time for experimentation, especially when it comes to programming, and I am really glad that programs like Insight Data Science and my job have taught me "the hacker mentality".
Anyway, I promise I will put this to good use soon folks!
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