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GDQStat.us, for those who didn’t see it during this year’s SGDQ, is/was a realtime data visualization of that biannual charity livestream. I had wanted to do something with realtime dataviz for the better part of a year - case in point my ‘failed’ Twitch visualizer, CrowdShout - and had just gotten the Javascript chops to be able to pull something like this off.

So, in early June when I first had the inking of an idea to do this project, I jumped head first into the world of realtime data aggregation and visualization, and had a really great time.

Over the past few years, GamesDoneQuick has become quite a livestream phenomena as a biannual charity livestreams of games from throughout the history of video games. I love watching these streams, and because of the unique dataset, was interested in the relationships between games, platforms, release years, and the current speedrun ’time-to-beat’. With SummerGamesDoneQuick 2016 rapidly approaching, I decided it’d be a good time to make some visualizations.

Being a Python nerd, I started my data visualization with an Jupyter notebook and a generous application of matplotlib.

I was working on a script for grabbing recent commit messages from Github this week when I realized that the Github handle bcongdon was available!

Until this point, I don’t think I’ve really stated the intent / purpose of this blog. I’ll try not to philosophize too much on this point, but I think it would be interesting to record my intentions going into this writing project.

If you haven’t yet played Factorio, I think you should. Especially if you have any interest in logistics problems, circuit design, or coding. Sure, you don’t do any coding or circuit design in Factorio, but the main gameplay loop will have you tackling similar problems.