The city of Vienna started releasing waiting times for some of its service offices recently. I followed my usual hunch and just wrote a small script on scraperwiki that stows away the JSON released by the city not knowing yet what to do with it.

Weeks later Hacks/Hackers Vienna decided to host a hackathon. I couldn’t make it (I thought I might) but had the idea to develop the data into a visualization. I sat down later that week and published a visualization of waiting times.

So why am I rambling on about this?

I realized a couple of things while doing this:

One or two years back, facing a problem like this I would have: made space on a server, write an extensive scraper in python, set up a database to store stuff, write a backend web-application to generate graphics and spit them out.

Today: I have my scraper and backend run as a service by scraperwiki, use d3 to generate graphics on the client (much better looking ones) and host the whole thing for free on github - because I don’t need a backend anymore.

This is made possible by:

• More and more things offered as a service (often for free)
• Amazing frameworks in modern languages, that make development easier
• Fantastic resources to exchange knowledge

Developing a small data-driven application used to be a lot of work - not anymore. While it takes a while to get used to the intricate ways of some frameworks (d3 has a quite unique way of doing things): once you’re over the hump, things get a lot easier. This leaves you in the end thinking about the visualization or application you’re building: not worrying about server security, costs and setup.

This also means: Full stack datavisualization has become easier. You needed a team of specialists (sysadmins, backend-developers, designers) to do a decent dataviz: now you just learn the missing parts and you’re able to pull it off.