Jake VanderPlas Talks About Declarative Python Visualizations & Altair
In mid-February Jake VanderPlas gave a great talk, titled “Bespoke Visualizations with a Declarative Twist”, at Convoy’s first Speaker Series event. Jake focused on the current state of visualizations in Python and which Python visualization libraries are good for what, e.g., Bokeh is good for web view and interactivity.
Then the presentation segued to Altair: a declarative statistical visualization library for Python, based on Vega-Lite. At the time of the presentation Jake and a few of Altair’s co-developers did a complete rewrite of the library — giving it new features and flexibility.
He live demoed the new features — many of which were jaw dropping. In one example (see below) he was able to explore time-series biking data in Seattle interactively with concise declarative Python code.
Visualizing in Python has come a long ways. There were lots of great questions and interaction throughout the event. We all walked away after the event with one thing in mind: Altair is impressive to say the least.
We’ll have another Speaker Series event in the later part of March. If you’d like to keep up to date, follow the events here.
