A technical exploration into saving contact form emails into Google Sheets using AWS serverless tools — In working with the team at Grassroots Analytics, Graphicacy’s engineering team tackled a particular challenge: how to ensure minimum costs to a client while storing changing data and providing updates on fast-changing predictions. Our goal was to maximize the impact of PrimaryCast, a data visualization and mapping tool that provides…

How to use GitHub pages to host an HTTPS website and embed into Wix — As a bespoke data visualization firm, Graphicacy frequently get requests to build out a single data visualization component for a website that the client will embed via <iframe/> into their existing site. About 95% of the time, after building the data visualization component, we use a GitHub Action on merge…

How to “disconnect” while still delivering on time — I always want to be able to take my laptop and work from anywhere — Amtrak, the park around the corner, the front stoop. But given that my job involves building web-based data visualizations, it isn’t always easy with little or no wi-fi. I often need to hit an API…

An interactive geospatial and forecasting tool that provides investors with information on potential agriculture investments in Ghana. — Summary The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition is an initiative that builds upon previous commitments to abate hunger in Africa including, Feed the Future, Grow Africa, and the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program. New Alliance partners include the G8, private companies and several African countries, namely Ghana, Ethiopia…

When a disaster strikes, many businesses rush to identify affected customers and react. For example, some may offer no-fee loans, reduce or remove late fees, or take other actions to assist customers in a time of need. Identifying affected customers is essential for businesses. As I was looking for information…

As an engineer, I’m often passed a big block of text as either a PDF or Word document and asked if I can add it into a web application. The easiest way to do this is to copy and paste into a <p/> tag, but that’s not suitable for those…

Within the United Kingdom there are approximately 650 constituencies, which makes for a highly detailed map. A detailed map means a larger file size and therefore more heavy processing on the client side, so when building the UK Political Atlas we needed a solution that wouldn’t slow down client-side rendering when exploring different constituencies. We decided on an offline approach of rendering each constituency with d3-node (which allows for static rendering with the power of d3) and then converting the rendered SVG into a PNG with sharp. Within one minute, we had 650 static PNG files of ~7kb each; compared to the 6mb GeoJSON file with which we started. Now when a user loaded a constituency detail page the browser only had to retrieve a single small file and the page would load fast even on mobile or older browsers.

One of the best parts about building data visualizations for the web is providing users with interactivity. Many times when looking over a PDF or a printout I find myself instinctually mousing over or clicking on an element to get more information. TLDR; The Angular and React sample code for…

At Kabbage, we provide access to small business loans for thousands of customers and, subsequently, need to provide exceptional customer service. Many times this service comes from a customer navigating our user-friendly website, but more often than not an on-the-go small business owner will want to call in and talk…