I stumbled across chart.xkcd earlier this week - a nifty little library that draws charts in a “hand-drawn” style, ala xkcd. Initial thought: “Oh, cool!” … immediately followed by “Welp. There goes two hours of my life.”
The first one I decided to tackle was the line chart. A bit of fiddling around on Yahoo Finance, some massaging to make the x-axis labels non-overlapping, et voila!
Next up I thought I’d try using the donut chart to show the distribution of titles in Bruno Connelly’s org. Man…that turned out to be a data quality nightmare. inchart spewed forth a murky bucket of non-standardized job titles. No shit, Nicholas Han’s “short” title as listed by inchart is “Mgr, SREing”. I thought about doing manual data cleanup and decided I didn’t wanna, so I thought about doing location instead. This proved to have some discrepancies in standardization, as well - sometimes the full address is listed, sometimes just the city, Bangalore vs. Bengaluru, etc. It would’ve been easier to clean up than titles…but I still didn’t wanna. So I turned to departments. This was much better, although it exposed an interesting limitation; it looks like once you get beyond 10 categories the library runs out of colors and just starts mapping each category in the “long tail” onto black:
When it came time to look at the bar chart, I thought to myself “What would Randall Munroe do?” I ended up deciding on a bar chart of planetary radii. At first I was representing them in kilometers, but that actually exposed another shortcoming of the library; due to a formatting bug numbers with more than 5 digits were being labeled as “0,000”. Hrm. Luckily the site I used to get the data also had the radii listed relative to Earth’s radius, so I just used that instead:
Update: When I was mucking about with the data labels on the share price graph it looks like I completely forgot about the month of March, which skews the data in the screenshot. I’m going to leave it for posterity, but I’ve fixed the data in the git repo. Thanks to the sharp eyes of Micah Stubbs for catching it!
