While I spend most of my time at Flatiron School learning and working with Ruby on Rails, I recently decided to build an application in Django. I already had a background in Python, and I wanted to see how easy it would be to interpret another web application framework using the basic principles I’d learned through working with Ruby on Rails.
I haven’t seen Inception since my senior year of high school, but the concept stuck with me. The movie centers around a group of information thieves, professionals who infiltrate dreams to look for secret information. When a dream gets too dangerous, the characters enter a dream within that dream. In order to wake up, the adventurers must first exit the innermost dream, then progress backwards through all the previous dreams. Little did I know as a high school senior that Inception provides the perfect metaphor for recursive functions.
How to create a pie chart in d3() from scratch. d3 provides two commands to make it easier to create pie charts: d3.pie() and d3.arc(). First, let’s explore d3.pie().
Recently, I decided to turn my birdwatching hobby into a more serious citizen science project. For the last four months, I’ve walked the same trail at the same time each week, taking note of all the birds I see and hear. By the end of May, I had notebooks full of times, dates, temperatures and lists of bird species. To turn all that raw information into a comprehensible format, I built a React application to display my data. I created bar graphs composed of SVG elements to display the number of species and individual birds seen on each day. I added two interactive dropdown menus to display the breakdown of sightings on a selected day, and the distribution of a selected species over the past three months. (You can see the project here: https://github.com/LucyWeltner/birdwatching_data)
When the CSS “flex shrink” property was first explained to me, I quickly grasped the basic concept, and assumed that my general understanding would make “flex shrink” easy to implement. Basically, “flex shrink” determines whether and how fast CSS elements will shrink to fit inside the window. Simple, right?