Plotting the family

This is an attempt to run a script on my site that shows the relative heights of all the younger members of my family. I’m hoping that as few people as possible see this, so that I don’t get anxious about putting this info in the public domain.

But it’s hardly controversial stuff, so I don’t know why I’m getting anxious. It just feels a bit personal, you know?

Steps taken Here’s how I created an interactive growth chart:

Over the course of 10 years, mark down childrens’ heights!
Collate all the data in a spreadsheet
Wait for AI to go mainstream, then pepper Claude/ChatGPT with questions about plotting data like this on an interactive graph, and tool recommendations
Follow the instructions, with various bits of trial and error, until you have a working prototype
Work out how to style the chart in a suitably user-friendly fashion
Return to your AI chums to understand how this could be put online
Push to new website
Send to family members and write this blogpost

Prompts used:

Step 1

I need support creating a data visualisation. I have a spreadsheet of measurements of a number of people, detailing their height (in cm) across many years. What I’d like to do is turn this into an interactive chart, which I could publish online, whereby a user would be able to hover over any point on a given person’s line, and a box would pop up showing the height & their age at the time of measurement. What tool could i use to create this?

Claude recommended Plotly, Chart.js and D3.js. I wanted to use Python, not js, so went with Plotly.

Step 2

Please write some example code that creates exactly what I’m looking for.

Claude created a script for me.

Step 3

My data is laid out in four columns: Name, Height, Age, Date. I now need to work out how to get this into the Python script and run it in plotly.

hit an error.

Step 4 (and 5,6,7,8,9…)

I am getting the error [xxx] in Terminal. What could be causing this?

Lots of back and forth at this point, due to the fact that the script had cached a view of the spreadsheet and was including a trailing space in one of the column titles.

Finally got it up and running. Hey presto…