Plotly 2022 Wrapped
From new product releases and webinars to job fairs and community app challenges, Plotly life was bustling and full of energy this year. We ventured into Dash Enterprise 5.0; we explored San Francisco, California, and Austin, Texas and established a satellite office in Vancouver, Canada; and we welcomed talented new hires to the team.
2022 can’t be encapsulated in one article. But we tried anyway. Here’s the year squeezed into about 1,000 words.
Community
Activity on the Plotly Community forum increased by an average of 20%. And compared to 2021, the number of Dash downloads increased by 60% in 2022. Multiple incredible developments within the community contributed to this…
Dash Club
Dash Club, the newsletter written by Plotly Community Manager, Adam Schroeder, and Creator of Dash, Chris Parmer, had three email blasts this year and numerous cheat sheets. Sign up to get the next one!
Component Index
Created this year, the community component index highlights many of the Dash components created by the community over the last couple of years.
OpenToWork team
The OpenToWork team receives job and internship alerts that require experience with Plotly and Dash. If you are an employer searching for people who have strong Plotly and Dash skills, create a post with your job description, while notifying the @OpenToWork group and adding the #job-postings tag.
Dash-Example-Index
The Dash-Example-Index is a community-supported project designed for people who are new to Plotly and Dash. It contains minimal sample apps with ~100 lines of code to demonstrate basic usage of graphs, components, callbacks, and layout design.
P&D500
The dataset currently stands at over 1,200 hand-picked apps. Read the full medium article.
Product
Dash Enterprise 5.0 was the major product release in 2022. The goal was to improve the user experience of both Dash app authors and IT system administrators — and our engineers delivered. The resulting cutting-edge product design removes barriers to bringing data apps into production, including a simplified way to upload and cache large data, scalable Kubernetes architecture, 1-click deploy button, drag-and-drop Workspace IDE. Watch the recorded product launch webinar and check out the press release.
Don’t worry, we didn’t neglect our open-source packages! Plotly.js, Plotly.py, Dash, and jupyter-dash each saw multiple new releases this year.
Events & User Stories
Creating content becomes second nature when the product is in such high-demand. So naturally, the marketing calendar was packed this year!
8 Webinars
The Crypto Revolution: Blockchain and data science experts explained how Dash can be used to leverage blockchain technology.
Effective ML Workflows: Rob Calvin and Elliot Gunn, Plotly Sales Engineers, described how organizations can deliver successful machine learning projects by visualizing data throughout the ML lifecycle.
Championing Digital Transformation with Dash: Data scientists from Kansas City Chiefs showed how they are using Dash to optimize business and operations, specifically for real-time data for ticket sales and game-day traffic, and social media analytics.
Real-Time Operational Analytics: Mike Razo, Plotly Director of Technical Account Management, explored best practices for delivering operational analytics in real time. He showed how the flexibility of Dash drives analytics with powerful, responsive models, and delivers purpose-specific views for both operational teams and strategic stakeholders.
Fast Dash Apps for Production Environments: Chris Parmer, Plotly Co-Founder & Creator of Dash, showed how to optimize app performance in deployment and production environments.
Dash Best Practices with Plotly Professional Services: Alex Hsu from Plotly Professional Services answered commonly asked questions related to UI/UX, data connections, compute, and performance.
The 5th Generation of Dash Enterprise: Plotly Co-Founder and CPO, Chris Parmer, expanded on how Dash Enterprise 5.0 can create analysis tools that everyone in the organization can leverage, providing a demo of the new features and snappy UI of the platform. Additionally, Russ Zaliznyak, Principal Data Scientist at Intuit, spoke technically as well as personally about Dash Enterprise. He reflected,
“The analyst can be an engineer, a designer, and a data scientist all at once. Never before in my career have I been able to do that. I have zero HTML experience, zero engineering experience — meanwhile, I’m able to build a stand-alone app that serves hundreds of people at the company.”
Efficient Streaming Pipelines at Scale with Databricks: Following the two Medium articles that we collaborated with Databricks on (Article 1: Building Plotly Dash Apps on a Lakehouse with Databricks SQL, Article 2: Build Real-Time Production Data Apps with Databricks & Plotly Dash), this technical workshop was the first of many partnership events.
4 In-Person Conferences
Dipping our toes into the waters of post-pandemic events felt more like diving head-first into the deep end (in a good way). We gathered our newly-branded swag and posted up at booths. From a wide range of industries, visitors presented an equally wide range of use cases, from needing real-time supply chain data to marketing analysis and strategy. The Plotly graphing library, Dash open-source framework, and Dash Enterprise platform were our triple threat in offering a solution to their challenges.
8 Published User Stories
Knowing that Dash is helping global organizations achieve their business goals is rewarding in and of itself, but collaborating with these internal teams to write stories really takes it to the next level. The following user stories were written in 2022, each presenting a unique challenge, solution, and result.
Deploying an application is a whole different ball game from building one. Deploying and building from your workspace in Dash Enterprise is very easy because the platform handles a lot of the work. We can make a quick change and deploy within five minutes without disrupting the service. –Andrew Schutte, Data Scientist at Kansas City Chiefs
Our Team
The Plotly team continues to grow steadily, and this year, headcount increased by 26%! We welcomed new hires across Canada and the United States, and even opened a third entity in the United Kingdom.
Plotly’s flexible work environment allows employees to work from home, while Montreal employees can also work from the head office. To help our team stay connected, we launched a new internal tool called Donut, which allows team members to virtually connect with others across the company. We leveled up our managers with a development program, and we significantly improved our performance management tools in preparation for further growth in 2023.
Check out our careers page — we’re still hiring!
Queue 2023…
Whether you tuned into a webinar, grabbed a sticker at our booth, perused our careers page, or contributed to our community forum — thanks for spending 2022 with us. And if you are new to Plotly, welcome!
We hope to see you all in 2023!
Claire Ongaro
Plotly Marketing
