Warriors Data Viz Project | Part I: The Inspiration

One of the things I really miss about Hackbright is project time. Is that weird? I loved the unobstructed time we had to ourselves to just be lost in our own code. I'd have "codepiphanies" during random times of the day--in my sleep, when I'm trying to relax with a glass of wine and Netflix on a Friday night, in the shower, on the Muni, etc, and they were enlightening.

Even though I technically have all my time to myself now, it's not the same. My time is still divided into chunks, and it's hard to be immersed in code when I'm worrying about applying to jobs, keeping my algorithms studying up to date, staying active in the community with events, etc.

Last week, Hackbright held a mini hackathon for three hours, which was a great motivator to starting a new project. Even though we could have just worked on our projects at home, having a special, blocked out time at the HB lounge with a TA and technical mentor there for help just made things different.

I started on a project I had been wanting to tackle for a while--data visualization using data on the Golden State Warriors! Why the Warriors? I didn't start watching basketball games--or any sports--until I moved to the Bay Area three years ago, so it's really fascinating from a newbie sports fan's perspective to discover how frequently and suddenly players can just be poached and traded. I remember Jesse showing me this after DeMarcus Cousins of the Sacramento Kings suddenly got acquired after the All Star Game by the New Orleans Pelicans, spurring a bout of confusion with everyone, including his own manager:

We don't even know where to go... pic.twitter.com/NV1ySfJvun

— Andrew Rogers (@Andrew_Rogers_) February 20, 2017

The New Orleans Pelicans flipped the NBA on its axis late Sunday night when they agreed to a deal for Sacramento Kings center DeMarcus Cousins, according to The Vertical's Adrian Wojnarowski. (Source: Bleacher Report)

I was shocked to find out that a player can suddenly be uprooted just like that! Also interesting to me is how the teams have to adjust their game and strategy to the trading of players. Just as a team has finally turned into a well-oiled machine after a season together, they could be sent into a spiral of having to go through this whole process again with the loss of some familiar players when new ones are traded in.

So I figured, since this is all so new to me, and I've been wanting to give a go at data visualization (nothing in my Hackbright project really required one), why not learn by doing? And that's how I absorb information the best: kinesthetic learning. If I have to wrangle with data on the Warriors, I'm bound to learn a few things about the different teams they had throughout the seasons while also learning how to use d3 to visually depict the whole picture.

I'm really excited! I've started building my scraper so I'll go into details on how I'm doing that in my next blog post of this series.