How everything started!

Welcome to the last issue of 2024. Yes, time flies. 😳

Today, I'd like to share the story of the first impactful chart I ever made.

It was about 12 years ago. I was in class with 20 other students, writing R code for a lesson on statistics and genomics.

Instead of doing the assignment, I took a break, made this little Christmas tree, and sent it to everyone:

It didn't get me a good grade, but it gave everyone a good laugh!

That's how it started

A few months later, I graduated. Not feeling ready to dive into professional life, I decided to cross the Atlantic on a sailing boat. It was an epic experience.

In the middle of the trip, I got an email from the same teacher who was in the class when I made that Christmas tree. He'd heard about my sailing trip and offered me a job!

When I got back, I started working in his lab as a bioinformatician. I wrote a lot of R, a bit of Python, and quickly fell in love with data visualization.

Side Projects

One day one of my best friends showed me how he was making websites with WordPress. That's how the R Graph Gallery was born!

I spent nights and weekends building it. A few ppl laughed at me 😔. But it started to become popular and even led to a job in Australia.

There I made more websites, like data-to-viz.com, which opened the door to a six-figures job at a big tech company called Datadog where I learned software engineering (d3.js ❤️!).

I've never stopped diving into side projects.

Beyond managing six educational websites, I've scraped Twitter to understand where surfers travel, failed to become rich with crypto, started an app for planning real estate investments, and so much more.

2024

This year was the biggest step yet: my side projects grew enough for me to leave my job and focus on them full-time! 🔥

Here's a quick summary of how things turned out:

• 8,000+ subscribers are now reading this newsletter.
• The galleries get millions of visits every year.
• I've been invited to give 10 talks this year.
• I won a dataviz challenge.
• 800+ people have joined my courses: productive-r-workflow.com and matplotlib-journey.com.

And more importantly, I have much more time to spend with my family and go surfing 🙂

Why am I sharing this?

I'm not saying this to brag. As the year wraps up, you're probably planning for 2025, just like me. So here are a few things I wish I'd learned sooner:

Build side projects. Most won't make money, but they're invaluable for growth. The skills and insights you gain will surprise you, and sometimes, they'll lead to unexpected opportunities.

Write what you learn. Our field is technical and complex. Taking notes helps solidify your understanding, and sharing them publicly can help others, and even get you noticed.

Connect with people. Every great opportunity I've had came through amazing humans, not just my laptop. Build genuine relationships. They'll pay off in ways you can't imagine.

Dataviz is incredible. It's fascinating, offers strong career opportunities, and there is still so much to do in the field! Look at this graph by a Nobel-winning economist! 🙈

A pretty bad chart in a Nobel Prize Lecture. Link.

Thank you for an amazing year, and see you in 2025!

Yan
PS: anything I could do better with this newsletter? drop me an email!