Finally, here comes the (in)famous Dashboard Week! On each day this week our cohort (me and the other eight of us) are given a fresh new dataset to cast our eyes on. The goal is to produce a dashboard on the data by the next morning.
See other posts in my Dashboard Week series:
- Dashboard Week day 1 – The Ascent of Starlink
- Dashboard Week day 2 – From the best to the not so good superannuation funds in Australia
- Dashboard Week day 3 – Can I park on the street near where I want to eat out? (City of Melbourne)
- Dashboard Week day 4 – The more you know, the happier you are?
- Dashboard Week day 5 – A glimpse into the Japanese Grand Prix
Day 1 began with Coaches Ross and David giving us a briefing on how the week would go. Then off we went toying with our first dataset – an open-source SpaceX API with plenty of data on the space exploration company’s rocket launches and various other ventures.
Data exploration
I spent around two hours looking through the various API endpoints. Eventually, what caught my eye was all the data on the Starlink satellite network.
I first retrieved and cleaned up data on all the Starlink launches. Then I loaded this into Tableau for a bit of data exploration to see what interesting things I could find. This led me to go back and get data on all SpaceX launches in general (also from the API) as well as subscriber numbers from Starlink’s Wikipedia article.
Alteryx workflow
Alteryx workflow for Starlink and launches data from the API given
Alteryx workflow for Starlink subscriber numbers from Wikipedia
After this I continued examining all of the data I had and made lots of charts in Tableau, trying to come up with a cohesive story. However, come 5 pm I realised I still had no story to weave everything together. I ended up completing my dashboard late in the evening after some commitments, which wasn’t ideal but would have to do for day 1 of Dashboard Week.
Tableau viz
I went with a dark background for my viz, which is a first for me. I have included charts presenting various interesting facets of the Starlink program, but if I could do this again I’d definitely try to nail down the story I’d like to tell earlier in order to reduce the last-minute panic.
Here’s my viz on Tableau Public:
On to Day 2 today!
Author: Vincent Ging Ho Yim
Vincent has always enjoyed learning new things as well as finding elegant and efficient solutions to problems since childhood. He studied linguistics at university and has subsequently worked in theatre lighting and broadcast captioning. In his previous job he found his passion working with data and decided to pursue a change in career. In his spare time he likes reading, learning languages (both human and programming ones) and playing Pic-a-Pix and sudoku. He loves laksa, sushi and burritos.