Dash Club 15: Figure Friday, Plotly Hangouts, Product Updates, Blogs, Component and App of the Month

Published in

Plotly

8 min readJul 17, 2024

Written by: Chris Parmer and Adam Schroeder

Welcome to the Dash Club newsletter. Dash Club brings essays and updates about Plotly and Dash every 8 weeks. To have these directly delivered to your inbox, sign up.

Version Check

Dash Enterprise Platform 5.4 (announcement)
Dash Open Source Framework 2.17.1 (changelog)
Dash AG Grid 31.2.0 (changelog)
Plotly.py 5.22.0 (changelog)
Plotly.js 2.33.0 (changelog)

Figure Friday

📣 We are excited to announce a new collaborative Plotly initiative: Figure Friday.

Every Friday, Plotly will release a data set and a sample figure. The community will have one week — until midnight of the following Thursday — to enhance that figure, build their own Plotly figure, or create a Dash app.

The goal of this initiative is to enhance our Plotly skills, collaborate among community members, and share our creations with the world, while we develop our personal portfolio of data visualizations and apps.

Check out last week’s data set on Plotly forum.

To keep track of the weekly data sets we will be releasing, please visit the Plotly forum under the figure-friday tag or join the Plotly Discord channel.

Plotly Hangouts

Community members attending the June Hangout got a chance to meet Andrew Schutte, a Senior Data Scientist at the Kansas City Chiefs. We saw a live demo of a Dash app used by Kansas City Chiefs staff. We also learned about the data science functions within a successful football team. And we heard Andrew’s career reflections on transitioning from accounting into a data science role.

As a reminder, Plotly Hangouts are a space where you can meet and interact with data scientists and data analysts merged in the world of data visualization, Plotly, and Dash.

Our next Hangout will take place on July 31, at noon Eastern Time. The guest speaker will be John Kang, the Director of Planning Analytics and Industrial Engineering at Cox Automotive.

The Hangout will highlight the following:

What it is like to work with data in an analytics workforce
Tech stack supporting Cox Automotive Dash applications
Career advice for people on the analytics side of the business

Sign-up to receive a calendar invite for the Hangout.

🛳️ Plotly Ships: Data Apps for Everyone

90% of data and AI projects do not reach production or decision-makers. Chart towards a future where data creates tangible business impact through actions and interactivity. Our upcoming product launch enhances collaboration, control, and customizability.

On July 24 at 12PM EDT, we’re navigating new waters with our latest product release to enhance collaboration, control, and customizability.

Transform notebooks to production apps with Plotly App Studio
Customize maps with MapLibre
Enhance user experience with new Plotly Dash updates
Efficiently query Big Data with DuckDB

Join industry experts, Plotly customers, and leadership for roadmap updates and new community programs. Get your pass!

Databricks Dash App Challenge

Thank you Cees for submitting the QuizDash app to the Databricks Dash App Challenge. The unique way Cees chose to use the DBRX LLM in this Dash app makes learning new topics much easier and a lot more fun. The app offers several AI-based features.

Quiz Generation: Users can generate a customized quiz by selecting a topic, uploading text or a PDF, and specifying the number of questions, options, and difficulty level.
Quiz Overview: This page provides an overview of created quizzes, displaying basic information about the quiz.
Play a Quiz: Users can play the quiz, check answers, receive explanations, and view results on the final slide using interactive dash components.
Personal AI Tutor: A chat interface allows users to ask questions and receive guidance from a personal AI tutor.

To get the app to work on your computer locally, simply clone this repo, and add your DBRX_BASE_URL and DBRX_API_KEY to a .env file. Then, add the credentials to the components/model.py file.

Thank you Vlad for submitting the DoomBerg app to the Databricks Dash App Challenge.

The DoomBerg app pulls S&P 500 data and runs a negative analysis on the stock chosen. Based on the EBIDTA and recent news, a Senior Doom Research Analyst orchestrates a team of agents (e.g. an Analyst, Financial Model Builder, and Dash Programmer) to build a Dash app for measuring “Gloom” and explaining how a stock might be negatively impacted based on current events.

To get the app to work on your computer locally, simply clone this repo, install the libraries found in the requirements.txt file, and add your DATABRICKS_TOKEN and DATABRICKS_BASE_URL to a .env file. Then, run the app: python main.py

Plotly Blogs

Check out these recent pieces from our blog page:

Additionally, we’ve been adding to our user story portal, including pieces from S&P Global, UK Power Networks, and more!

Component of the Month

Dash Blueprint Components (DBTC) is a new community component built by our new community member Stefano.

DBTC uses Dash to wrap the Blueprint JS React-based UI toolkit for the web. It is optimized for building complex data-dense interfaces for desktop applications. To get started, simply pip install dash-blueprint-components and run the code located in the Readme file, similar to how you would run any Dash app.

To read more about Dash Blueprint Components, see the forum post.

More on Dash Blueprint Components: Docs, PyPI, GitHub.

Button component and its properties:

FormGroup component and its properties:

🙏 Thank you Stefano for creating this component and sharing it with the Plotly Dash community.

Visit our components index to see more components made by the community! And join our component-builder community by creating and sharing your own Community Components.

App of the Month

The NFL Offense Stats App: The perfect platform to visualize NFL offense statistics with interactive charts. From rushing yards to passing yards, carries, or receptions, you can easily compare between NFL players and teams.

This rich app, created by community member Alfredo, is built with Dash, Plotly, and Dash Bootstrap Components. Not only is it a pleasure to look at, but plenty of fun to interact with.

More on the NFL app: App, GitHub, Forum post

🙏 Thank you Alfredo for creating this app and submitting it to the Show and Tell.

See more Dash apps or share your own in the community forum’s Show and Tell tag. If you would like your app to be considered for the next edition of the Dash Club newsletter or the Dash Explore Page, please submit your app by clicking the Share Your App button.

Things Happen

One of the easiest ways to present data for technical and non-technical audiences is to create a dashboard that neatly displays all of your data visualizations and insights in one place. Adam Schroeder, Plotly Community Manager, built a free 6-session course that teaches how to build dashboards with Plotly Dash.

🎨 Long-time community member, Ann Marie, created Dash Pylette, which serves as a tool to extract color palettes from images. We thought so highly of this app that we added it to the Data Viz section of the Dash Explore Page.

📊 Another impressive app added to the Dash Explore Page is the Qablet. It was built by Somdip, and it allows one to explore a variety of financial contracts through two lenses — historic, and model-based.

📢 Thank you to Ann Marie for contributing new features to the dcc.Loading.

🎙️Check out the Dash microphone for audio, built by community member, tbone. This new Dash component records audio and allows you to download the mp3 file.

📺 Watch how S&P Global Market Intelligence delivered AI-powered analytics from large-scale, text-based datasets with Dash Enterprise and Databricks.

✈️ Plotly staff members had the pleasure of attending Databricks Data+AI summit in San Francisco.

🔌 The Unit Commitment app created by Ludwik allows us to analyze and optimize the cost of operating a power system. Read more on the forum post.

🧑‍💻 Thank you to community member, Muhammad, for building and sharing the HR analysis app.

✈️ Plotly staff members, Abe, Monanshi, and Eliza, attended the Collision conference in Toronto.

💡Interested in interacting with Discord through Dash? Community member, PipInstallPython, has the component you’re looking for: Dash-Discord.

⌚ Ever wanted to design a Dash app specific for smartwatches? Community member, PipInstallPython, shares some tips in this forum post.

✍️ Jose Gómez was looking for a Rich Text Markdown editor compatible with Dash, and he couldn’t find one that met his needs, so he simply created one.

🖼️ Ever wanted to turn images into 2.5D animations?! Community member, nielsp’s, parallax-maker component is built on top of Dash.

💼 Job postings from around the world looking for Plotly and Dash skills.

🔢 Community member, Mohamed, shows us how to combine Mito within a Dash app to quickly show AI-assisted edits made to a spreadsheet.

✍️ Check out this post to learn how to add a copy button to Dash Ag Grid’s cells, by Ann Marie.

📖 Given the ongoing interest in supporting the open-source Plotly and Dash frameworks, we’ve put together a list of contribution opportunities.

💚 Celebrating our top community contributors of June 2024.

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Have a great week –

Chris (@chriddyp) & Adam (@adamschroeder)