Mike Bostock

Observable Notebook Kit and Desktop 1.1 are out. Headline feature: database connectors! 🎉 You can now query DuckDB, SQLite, Postgres, and Snowflake directly from notebooks. And it’s self-hosted. And it saves results automatically for performance and stable analysis. observablehq.com/notebook-kit...

A little demo of reactive SQL in Observable Notebooks 2.0, first using (native) DuckDB to bake data from a remote source, followed by DuckDB-Wasm to create and query reactive views in the client. Should be released this week!

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Observable Plot has crossed 100,000 weekly downloads (and very close to 5,000⭐️s)! observablehq.observablehq.cloud/oss-analytic...

Observable Notebook Kit and Desktop 1.3.0 are out, featuring data loader cells. You can now (finally!!) write Python and Node.js in notebooks. 🐍 observablehq.com/notebook-kit...

Observable Notebook Kit & Desktop 1.4 now support TypeScript cells, along with TypeScript for Node.js data loader cells. (Just type stripping, but greatly helps interoperability.)

I am excited about (and proud of) Observable Framework 1.1. It features Windows support, self-hosted npm: imports, and CommonMark compatibility. And it’s just three weeks since launch! More to come.

Release v1.1.0 · observablehq/framework

Windows support (and Node 18, too) 🎉 Framework now supports Windows! Thank you upvoting #90. 👍 Framework internally uses POSIX path delimiters (forward slashes /), and now converts to the Windows p...

The Notebooks 2.0 gallery now has a dedicated page! observablehq.com/notebook-kit...

A reviver/replacer technique for dates in JSON that won’t silently corrupt your data. observablehq.com/@mbostock/th...

Episode one of the Observable Podcast! Wherein @toph.me and I chat reactivity, mistakes in designing Observable JavaScript, and vanilla JavaScript in Notebooks 2.0. www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUh5...

Reactivity in vanilla JavaScript | Observable Podcast

YouTube video by Observable

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Plot prefers “tidy” data. (And Plot doesn’t really “prefer” array-of-objects; it uses columnar data internally. The most performant approach is to pass arrays of values to each channel, but array-of-objects is ubiquitous in JavaScript, so we make that easy.) vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-...

I am surprised that Fetch doesn’t yet have a way to track upload progress — you have to go back (20+ years) to XMLHttpRequest! There’s a nice observer proposal linked here though. jakearchibald.com/2025/fetch-s...

Fetch streams are great, but not for measuring upload/download progress

They're inaccurate, and there are better ways.

In this week’s Observable Podcast, co-CEO Julio and I discuss our mission to make computation easier for humans to use and understand. We need a better medium! youtu.be/0uBOL9NP8Iw?...

What even is Observable? | Observable Podcast

YouTube video by Observable

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It isn’t much work to support R/Rscript data loader cells (at least if you don’t mind a lack of syntax highlighting)… we’ll get to it soon. github.com/observablehq...

R data loaders · Issue #79 · observablehq/notebook-kit

Let’s add R, or more specifically Rscript, as a supported interpreter for data loader cells. The hard part is probably the lack of an officially supported Lezer grammar for the R language, but ther...

Reply to @ocks.org

@fil.rezo.net and I are working on further improvements to the waffle mark, including better tooltips, better stroke, and a better default unit for very large or very small values. github.com/observablehq...

waffle tips + waffle stroke + waffle unit: auto by Fil · Pull Request #2215 · observablehq/plot

unit: auto (closes waffle unit: auto #2214) waffle tips #2132 (merge commit, closes Waffle mark tooltips are always on axis line #2129) waffle stroke #2204 (merge commit closes Waffle pattern doe...

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I got a proof-of-concept self-hosted jsr: imports working, so we should be able to land this soon too! github.com/observablehq...

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Yes! I also like when the big numbers update on hover as in this example: observablehq.com/framework/ex...

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Nice! We’re working on ```sql cells to help with this. github.com/observablehq...

sql cells, backed by DuckDB by mbostock · Pull Request #844 · observablehq/framework

Fixes #48. TODO sql tagged-template literal implemented by npm:@observablehq/duckdb sql frontmatter option to declare which tables should be available to sql generate sql.init calls, or some su...