Background

The usual workflow when developing interactive data visualizations with D3.js is based on the significant number of examples that the community provides. They are broad and useful, but they are still not ideal. Most of the time, they require much effort to integrate into your code and make it production-ready.

We created Britecharts at Eventbrite in 2015. For our team, it was a way to encapsulate some complex chart code and extract it into a different repository. Fast forward two years, we open-sourced Britecharts. The intention behind open-sourcing Britecharts was twofold:

• Allowing developers and designers with little experience with D3.js to build great interactive charts with little effort.
• Proposing a structure for helping D3.js developers create charts. We sought to systematize standards like the Reusable API and Test-Driven Development.

Role

From the beginning, I have been the main contributor and maintainer of Britecharts. At first, the tasks were purely technical, as we needed to create charts we needed and keep the API consistent. I also mentored and onboarded several developers in the company.

Later, my role included more soft skills, especially after open-sourcing the project. I had to write blog posts, extend documentation, triage bug and interact with the community of developers that formed around the project.

Results

As of May 2023, Britecharts has more than 3.7K stars in Github, has been forked more than 240 times, and offers wrappers for all versions of Angular and React.js. The project is working on production for Eventbrite and other companies, and it has been the base of other successful open-source projects like mapd3.