PART ONE

Building Reusable Data Visualization Components for a Modern Web

This is part one of a two part series discussing why and how you can build your own reusable data visualization components to improve your development workflow and enjoy your work more. This article is aimed at intermediate-level JavaScript data visualization developers with at least a year or two of experience. That being said, novice and expert developers alike will most likely find something useful, and possibly think about approaching their data visualization development in ways that hadn’t previously.

In Part 1 we will be covering what a reusable component is, and why they are helpful for building data visualizations. Part 2 of this series will talk about how to go about actually building these component with plenty of real-world examples and code.

What is a reusable data visualization component, and why should we be concerned with building one? In my experience over the last 15 years designing and developing hundreds of data visualization solutions, I’ve come to realize that following a development pattern of building reusable data visualizations allowed me to enjoy my work more. While I loved the thrill of quickly compositing (read cut-and-paste) sample code liberally borrowed from around the web to build a visualization, the refinement process would always…