Keep on inspiring us, Yannick!

Our pal Yannick has left Bocoup to pursue his interests in data visualization at Google. We’re excited to see what he does next, but we wanted to take a minute to reflect on all the great things we did together over the past four years.

Yannick’s reputation precedes him; from the day he started, we expected great data visualization work. He consistently delivered on that across a varied portfolio of consulting projects. What caught us off guard, though, was his proclivity for sharing his passion and inspiring it in others. In service of the industry at large, he helped organize Open Vis Conf including an accompanying workshop on text visualization. He also shared his learning experiences through excellent posts on our blog. Within the local Boston community, he worked to promote the Boston Datavis meetup. And even just inside Bocoup, he facilitated “office hours” for data visualization along with a more structured colloquium for guided study of topics within the field. Whenever he attended an industry conference, we could count on him to share his insightful reflection on his favorite lectures. It’s safe to say that all of his co-workers became more fluent in the language of data visualization thanks to his efforts.

But Yannick’s not “all theory.” Time and time again, he proved himself capable in the practice of web application development. It was a pleasure to watch him fuse these two skills in the context of consulting, weaving popular tools like React and D3.js together. And that flair for knowledge sharing extended to this specialty: he set up “open source Fridays” to help us all set aside time to contribute to and talk about our favorite free and open source projects.

We’re sad to see Yannick go, but we’re keeping our chin up. By continuing to publish fascinating pieces on data visualization on his personal site, he’s helping us do that. We’re just as excited as you to read about his next project!