For my entire IT career, I've worked on internal systems so I've never really been able to show off the kinds of things I do all day. Hearthstone gave me a personal side project that shows off the kinds of things I do day to day (data collection, cleansing, data viz, etc) and helps pro players in the process. That's pretty satisfying.
Anyway, these are Hearthstone tournament decks visualized. I'm pretty proud of how this keeps evolving. #gaming #Hearthstone
@wickedgood oh that is really cool!!
@demi Thanks!
@wickedgood data viz is *so* cool and i liked doing that as part of my job.
@demi It feels as close to alchemy as you can get sometimes. You just take this pile of crap and turn it into gold.
@wickedgood curious (haven’t gotten to read the blog yet) what tools are you using for this?
@demi I'm using Tableau Public for the data viz, and I wrote a set of Python scripts to pull the card data from a public API, decode the deck lists from codes exported from the client, and then match those together and dump to a CSV that I manually combine into a big Excel doc that Tableau reads.
@wickedgood would be really cool to see this kind of stuff; thoughts on open source?
@wickedgood that is a big thing yeah, totally understand.
@demi I can probably share it with you via Dropbox or whatever tonight if you want to see it, though, as long as you don't mind my hacked together, self-taught by necessity Python code.
@wickedgood you don’t have to, i was just curious and am in no state to hack on things atm.
@demi Most of it was written in one four hour frenzied bout of hyperfocus. You know, the coding sessions when you're done and you know it works but you don't know how?
@demi I've considered it but I also feel like if I'm doing that then I need to clean the code up and comment it and do things the "right" way which isn't really where I want to spend my time for something that I basically hack at until it works and then stop, if that makes sense?