Ashima Panjwani
Ashima is a programmer with a degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences. An interest in using computational techniques to draw helpful insights from biological data led to her foray in computer science. She has since been working as a software engineer and loves dabbling in all things tech. She has contributed to various projects in the Clojure data science ecosystem.
@ashimapanjwani
Viz.clj - A Clojure data visualization library for beginners
By Ashima Panjwani
Our goal for creating Viz was to have a beginner-friendly library for visualizing data. Thus, our focus was mainly on building something which would be easy to use, have a consistent syntax, have excellent error handling capability to help the users debug their code, and have extensive documentation. We explored multiple data visualization libraries in various languages (eg. Altair, Vega-Lite API, ggvis, etc.), and the lessons learned from each of those were incorporated into Viz. My talk mainly revolves around the need for creating Viz, the various design decisions which were taken while building it, and the numerous problems we faced at each point during the journey.