Harry Stevens is a Graphics Reporter at The Washington Post and the author of “Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to ‘flatten the curve’” — the most popular post in The Washington Post’s online history.

We cover the necessary details of this global pandemic, the journalist, coding, and design skills required to be a graphics reporter, the backstory on visualizing this outbreak, why Harry chooses R over Python, advice for aspiring graphics reporters, and how all of this came together at the perfect time in history to give Harry a chance to catch lightning in a bottle.

Leave us a comment

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean’s developer cloud makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow. They have an intuitive control panel, predictable pricing, team accounts, worldwide availability with a 99.99% uptime SLA, and 24/7/365 world-class support to back that up. Get your $100 credit at do.co/changelog.
• Mux – Mux has done for video what Stripe has done for payments If you’re trying to build video into your app, you’ll have to decide between building it yourself or using an out-of-the-box platform. Mux simplifies all things video to an easy to use API. Get $50 in credit to play with at get.mux.com/changelog.
• Pluralsight – Stay home. Skill up. For free. Pluralsight is totally free for the entire month of April! With over 7,000 courses from experts in software development, security, cloud and data there’s never been a better time to skill up. Learn more and get started at pluralsight.com/changelog
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.

Featuring:

• Harry Stevens – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website

Show Notes:

• Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to “flatten the curve” ~ discuss
• COVID-19 (2019-nCoV) real time dashboard ~ full view
• ‘Contagion’ is one of the most popular thrillers on iTunes because of the coronavirus outbreak. Here’s how the film compares to reality.
• D3.js
• RStudio
• The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What’s Coming - Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, who warned of pandemic in 2006, says we can beat the novel coronavirus—but first, we need lots more testing.
• Deadliest Enemy by Michael Osterholm and Mark Olshaker — Our War Against Killer Germs
• Michael Osterholm on Joe Rogan Experience #1439

Something missing or broken? interviews-390.md">PRs welcome!