Most common birthdays in Switzerland, visualised

August 25, 2013

Once you’ve started getting into programming, there are always new mountains to climb. After learning the basics, my next goal is to be able to make decent use of D3.js, the de facto gold standard for data visualisations.

We’ve used it for our visualisation of migrants’ remittances, but that time around, it wasn’t me who had to write to code.

Well, it’s a long shot to that kind of D3 visualisation, but the nice thing about D3 is that you can start small and still build visualisations that work well (a bit of knowledge in Javascript and CSS help a lot, but I guess it’s possible without as well, I recommend Scott Murray’s D3 tutorials).

So here’s my first visualisation built in D3. It shows you the most common birthdays in Switzerland and how they spread over the year. I’ve also added a little Javascript tool that allows you to enter your own birthday and see how many others you share it with and how it compares to other dates.

I’ve open sourced the code, so if you want to use it for your own project, go ahead. Also, if you know your ways around D3, please have a look and tell me how I can improve the code.