My Italian grandparents operated a fish, chips and ice cream joint in Falkirk called the York Cafe.

It has nothing to do with the article but this is the first time I can remember Falkirk being discussed on HN!

This is why I've always found it weird that people consider D3 to be a charting tool. Yes, people have used it to build a lot of charts, but it's really just a streaming data processing tool. It doesn't provide anything specific to charting[0]. All of that part, you're still left to figure out on your own.

[0] At least in the core, I'm not too familiar with the full ecosystem and what is considered official in terms of plugins. Everytime I've tried to use it, I've not found the documentation leading me to using anything more specifically oriented towards charting.

Norway thinks they "own" some percentage of Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, etc. But is it really like that?

If, in the future, Norway will not deliver enough value to the USA in some way to justify that the USA pays them part of the value generated by those companies, why would the USA continue to do so? Wouldn't the USA just make their companies stop paying dividends to Norway or void Norway's shares in some way? There are probably many ways in which a country can prevent value flowing to foreign investors.

You might say "That would lead to a decline of foreign investments in the USA". True. But does the USA of the future care? If the "United States of AI" produces everything themselves, they might not care. They have a stronghold on ASML, TSMC is starting to build companies in the USA, they have Nvidia and all other GPU/TPU manufacturers, and they are investing big time into energy production.

What can keep the USA from becoming completely superior via AI and then stopping to deliver anything to the rest of the world?

Yeah, in the workshops I've run in the past (not tech related), having upfront questions that you can curate and research ahead of time can really help get the conversation going. But also leave time for in-person questions, because otherwise the audience can feel ignored when they really want to ask you something.

And as you said, not every workshop is the right fit for every participant, and that's fine! In my case, if your workshop happened to be nearby, I'd probably go check it out "just cuz". I don't meet a lot of data viz people in my rural area (Central Oregon).

If it required travel, I'd gladly go if my employer would pay for it (they won't, because it's not relevant to my current job). For me to be willing to take a day off work and pay for travel expenses & registration fees myself, probably the only thing that'd get me to attend is what I mentioned already, namely real-world expertise from people who use D3 a lot, not a beginner's workshop. To be clear, I AM a beginner at D3, but I've used a lot of other charting solutions in the past, and I probably wouldn't attend a workshop just to learn the basics. I generally learn basic usage better from written tutorials, but I still enjoy real-life conferences if there are more advanced panels/discussions. The difference (to me) is that the advanced discussions are less "how-to"s and more "here's stuff you probably never even thought about... avoid these pitfalls".

Good luck with your workshop though, and thank you for running it! Sounds like a great opportunity for people who learn well that way.

I'm a frontend dev and I'd love to learn D3.js. And I generally prefer in-person classes.

That said, I still probably wouldn't want to spend a whole day + significant travel expenses just to learn D3 :( It's the kind of thing that's not very efficient to learn in a classroom, IMO.

I'd prefer a lot of examples with good documentation, not a classroom where you spend an hour getting everyone set up with a basic IDE just to get a single circle drawn on the screen. The pacing of such a class would likely vary too much between students, depending on their JS and visualization experience, and it's not a good use of time in a professional setting.

If I had to go to a workshop like this (or if work was paying for it), I'd at a minimum hope that there are different tracks/curricula, like one for boot camp beginners and another for professional devs with some industry experience. I don't know how you'd do it for beginners (I probably wouldn't start with d3 in that case).

As a working dev, I'd really want something that exposes me to experts in the field working on complex projects that have undocumented or non-obvious "gotchas". I don't want to sit in a room listening to someone talk about something I could've learned in 5 minutes of reading the docs. I'd want expert wisdom, like actual firsthand extensive experience using D3 in the wild and the resultant experience. Something like "Here's one project we did. We chose D3 because of X, and we used these specific visualizations because of Y and Z. It turns out our first attempts failed and confused people, so we ended up doing A and B instead, and had to solve for problem C that the docs don't mention at all." etc. In other words, real-world problems and real-world workflows.

I also think a real-world Q&A would be helpful, if you're able to collect questions (and ideally code samples) from participants beforehand and then go through them live for the entire audience to learn from. Like "We got a question about using a treemap interactions on mobile, and this was the demo we got. I thought about it and tweaked it like this..." or "how do you do a good heatmap with accessibility considerations for colorblind users?" etc.

At the end of the day, I think some live coding time with no required pre-set agenda, but available 1:1 time with instructor(s), would be helpful. Like people could bring their own projects they're working on, or tweak an example you provide (ideally in some easily cloneable environment / web IDE that doesn't waste time on pipeline setup), but have experts on hand to provide guidance. Or if not, they can just leave the workshop early or mingle in the break area or whatever.

Hope that doesn't seem overly negative... was just trying to be honest about what would get me excited to attend such a workshop. I guess the TLDR of it is that I'd prefer it to be more able "sharing expertise from real-world professional usage" rather than "here's how you make a bar chart".