Hi! I'm Alok, a data visualization developer and UI/UX designer. Nice to see you here! I'll explain a bit about myself and my journey with data visualization. (TL;DR: I'm really passionate about my craft of visualizing data.)
My father was an architect and design had a huge impact on how I perceive things in general. I was also a computer nerd (called wizards back in early 2000's!) and this led me into exploring various 3D graphic modeling tools for building virtual models of houses in the computer to present to his clients. I was also introduced to DK Knowledge encyclopedias at a young age and the illustrations and visualizations fascinated me very much, that I even dreamed of becoming an illustrator for a while. The motion graphic scene where art and technology fused was mostly utilized for music videos and creative films back then and it was the closest to my idea of how I want things to be but it was not in the right domain (I wanted them to be used for sharing knowledge like the books I liked, not just for the shiny factor! i.e. needed both form & function) Fast forward ten years and I'm an Information Technology engineer working for a Telecom company in Finland through an Indian IT services organization, and after building several application features in C, Perl, JavaScript and XSLT on the back-end for developing information architecture systems, I encountered a problem that needs a solution, an interactive visual solution, D3 was on Github from an year by then and I knew enough about it to put together a quick prototype that impressed the clients, soon after, I took a segue and never looked back. The data visualization scene was glowing with openviz (conferences), podcasts, tools, features and libraries that made many things possible, and along with my job at Deloitte as a data visualization lead, all that has taught me a great deal about front-end web development, design, data visualization, human cognition, client management and a lot more . And seven years later, here I am, trying to build a few custom visuals/opensource tools that enable everyone to create bespoke data visualizations in my spare time.