How Shirley Wu Built A Career As A Freelance Data Visualizer

03/13/20 • 50 min

Shirley Wu is a freelance data visualization expert. Data visualization, at its core, is when you take lots of data, and it's hard for you to look in Excel. You visualize that into some graph or chart, and the most simple could be a bar chart or some graph so that you can understand trends within it easier.

In data visualization, there is an entire spectrum of approaches you can take with a dataset. You have to decide on the balance between art and the data. With clients, choosing where in that spectrum is asking yourself, "What do I want for the end-user to experience?" The difference between a purely artistic piece and a visualization is that with data visualization, there's a goal to it. You're taking data, and you're trying to communicate something, or you're trying to build a tool to help people explore that data.

Transcript

"How Shirley Wu Built A Career As A Freelance Data Visualizer" Transcript

Resources

Shirley Wu

Joel Hooks

Transcript

"How Shirley Wu Built A Career As A Freelance Data Visualizer" Transcript

Resources

Shirley Wu

Joel Hooks

Previous Episode

How Courtland Allen Grew Indie Hackers with Content, Consistency, and Community

"Indie Hacker" - An entrepreneur that is working to gain some form of independence.

Courtland Allen is the founder of indiehackers.com. He didn't take the venture capital approach. He just wanted to make enough money to support what he was trying to do. Courtland was trying to build a community of indie hackers who would share their stories, help each other, and support one another.

You can't force community growth. It takes good content, time, and consistency. At first, Courtland would make good content and share it with his mailing list, and he'd also make fake accounts and have discussions with himself on the indie hackers forum to try and spark real interactions. The efforts paid off. Over a year, a real community blossomed.

It's tempting to rely on your intuition when you are first starting as an indie hacker. But, Courtland encourages you to take a more thoughtful approach by relying more on the experiences of others. Over time you'll develop wisdom.

You can go too far, though. If you spend too much time preparing and learning, you'll realize how much you don't know, and it can be crippling. In Courtland's interviews with indie hackers, the most common advice people have is to go for it! Be okay with experiencing failures and starting over.

Transcript

"How Courtland Allen Found Freedom with Content, Consistency, and Community" Transcript

Resources

Courtland Allen

Joel Hooks

Next Episode

What is a Senior Engineer with Tomasz Łakomy

Tomasz highly recommends companies hire interns and train them because you can get some amazing engineers that you know are going to fit the company's needs. Another great advantage of training interns is that it levels up the senior engineers by giving them mentoring experience!

But, what really is a senior engineer? Basically, a senior engineer isn't a person who programs more, faster, or better. They're a person who makes others better at what they do and a person who can solve problems.

So how do you advance your career? Tomasz says that speaking at conferences had a major impact on his career. He strongly recommends that if somebody wants to start talking at conferences, to start at local meetups because one, you will get experience, and two, they're always looking for speakers.