Alternatives to amCharts

Here is my stack on #Visualization. @FusionCharts and Highcharts are easy to use but only free for non-commercial. Chart.js and Plotly are two lovely tools for commercial use under the MIT license. And D3.js would be my last choice only if a complex customized plot is needed.

We use Plotly (just their open source stuff) for Zulip's user-facing and admin-facing statistics graphs because it's a reasonably well-designed JavaScript graphing library.

If you've tried using D3.js, it's a pretty poor developer experience, and that translates to spending a bunch of time getting the graphs one wants even for things that are conceptually pretty basic. Plotly isn't amazing (it's decent), but it's way better than than D3 unless you have very specialized needs.

Hi,

I am looking at integrating a charting library in my React frontend that allows me to create appealing and interactive charts. I have basic familiarity with ApexCharts with React but have also read about D3.js charts and it seems a much more involved integration. Can someone please share their experience across the two libraries on the following dimensions:

1. Amount of work needed for integration
2. Amount of work or ease for creating new charts in either of the libraries.

Regards

Amit

We use Plotly (just their open source stuff) for Zulip's user-facing and admin-facing statistics graphs because it's a reasonably well-designed JavaScript graphing library.

If you've tried using D3.js, it's a pretty poor developer experience, and that translates to spending a bunch of time getting the graphs one wants even for things that are conceptually pretty basic. Plotly isn't amazing (it's decent), but it's way better than than D3 unless you have very specialized needs.

Here is my stack on #Visualization. @FusionCharts and Highcharts are easy to use but only free for non-commercial. Chart.js and Plotly are two lovely tools for commercial use under the MIT license. And D3.js would be my last choice only if a complex customized plot is needed.

Server side

We decided to use Python for our backend because it is one of the industry standard languages for data analysis and machine learning. It also has a lot of support due to its large user base.

• Web Server: We chose Flask because we want to keep our machine learning / data analysis and the web server in the same language. Flask is easy to use and we all have experience with it. Postman will be used for creating and testing APIs due to its convenience.

• Machine Learning: We decided to go with PyTorch for machine learning since it is one of the most popular libraries. It is also known to have an easier learning curve than other popular libraries such as Tensorflow. This is important because our team lacks ML experience and learning the tool as fast as possible would increase productivity.

• Data Analysis: Some common Python libraries will be used to analyze our data. These include NumPy, Pandas , and matplotlib. These tools combined will help us learn the properties and characteristics of our data. Jupyter notebook will be used to help organize the data analysis process, and improve the code readability.

Client side

• UI: We decided to use React for the UI because it helps organize the data and variables of the application into components, making it very convenient to maintain our dashboard. Since React is one of the most popular front end frameworks right now, there will be a lot of support for it as well as a lot of potential new hires that are familiar with the framework. CSS 3 and HTML5 will be used for the basic styling and structure of the web app, as they are the most widely used front end languages.

• State Management: We decided to use Redux to manage the state of the application since it works naturally to React. Our team also already has experience working with Redux which gave it a slight edge over the other state management libraries.

• Data Visualization: We decided to use the React-based library Victory to visualize the data. They have very user friendly documentation on their official website which we find easy to learn from.

Cache

• Caching: We decided between Redis and memcached because they are two of the most popular open-source cache engines. We ultimately decided to use Redis to improve our web app performance mainly due to the extra functionalities it provides such as fine-tuning cache contents and durability.

Database

• Database: We decided to use a NoSQL database over a relational database because of its flexibility from not having a predefined schema. The user behavior analytics has to be flexible since the data we plan to store may change frequently. We decided on MongoDB because it is lightweight and we can easily host the database with MongoDB Atlas . Everyone on our team also has experience working with MongoDB.

Infrastructure

• Deployment: We decided to use Heroku over AWS, Azure, Google Cloud because it is free. Although there are advantages to the other cloud services, Heroku makes the most sense to our team because our primary goal is to build an MVP.

Other Tools

• Communication Slack will be used as the primary source of communication. It provides all the features needed for basic discussions. In terms of more interactive meetings, Zoom will be used for its video calls and screen sharing capabilities.

• Source Control The project will be stored on GitHub and all code changes will be done though pull requests. This will help us keep the codebase clean and make it easy to revert changes when we need to.

As a frontend engineer on the Algorithms & Analytics team at Stitch Fix, I work with data scientists to develop applications and visualizations to help our internal business partners make data-driven decisions. I envisioned a platform that would assist data scientists in the data exploration process, allowing them to visually explore and rapidly iterate through their assumptions, then share their insights with others. This would align with our team's philosophy of having engineers "deploy platforms, services, abstractions, and frameworks that allow the data scientists to conceive of, develop, and deploy their ideas with autonomy", and solve the pain of data exploration.

The final product, code-named Dora, is built with React, Redux.js and Victory, backed by Elasticsearch to enable fast and iterative data exploration, and uses Apache Spark to move data from our Amazon S3 data warehouse into the Elasticsearch cluster.

Oof. I have truly hated JavaScript for a long time. Like, for over twenty years now. Like, since the Clinton administration. It's always been a nightmare to deal with all of the aspects of that silly language.

But wowza, things have changed. Tooling is just way, way better. I'm primarily web-oriented, and using React and Apollo together the past few years really opened my eyes to building rich apps. And I deeply apologize for using the phrase rich apps; I don't think I've ever said such Enterprisey words before.

But yeah, things are different now. I still love Rails, and still use it for a lot of apps I build. But it's that silly rich apps phrase that's the problem. Users have way more comprehensive expectations than they did even five years ago, and the JS community does a good job at building tools and tech that tackle the problems of making heavy, complicated UI and frontend work.

Obviously there's a lot of things happening here, so just saying "JavaScript isn't terrible" might encompass a huge amount of libraries and frameworks. But if you're like me, yeah, give things another shot- I'm somehow not hating on JavaScript anymore and... gulp... I kinda love it.

How Uber developed the open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Jaeger , now a CNCF project:

Distributed tracing is quickly becoming a must-have component in the tools that organizations use to monitor their complex, microservice-based architectures. At Uber, our open source distributed tracing system Jaeger saw large-scale internal adoption throughout 2016, integrated into hundreds of microservices and now recording thousands of traces every second.

Here is the story of how we got here, from investigating off-the-shelf solutions like Zipkin, to why we switched from pull to push architecture, and how distributed tracing will continue to evolve:

https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/

(GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)

Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark