Week 1 Competition Kickoff Data Visualization

Week 1: Data Visualization & Interactions

Published February 9, 2026 • Spring into AI

The first prompt was intentionally simple: take data from somewhere, make it visible, let people interact with it, and ship the lesson in public before the week runs out.

The Clock Started Here

Week 1 opened the sprint with a build window that ran from the kickoff post through Sunday at 11:59 PM CT. The assignment was not to disappear into tooling research or wait for the perfect architecture. It was to build something small enough to finish, public enough to count, and concrete enough to teach the rest of the group something.

Ugly was allowed. Imperfect was allowed. A chart pulling from a CSV was allowed. The point was reps: public shipping, visible learning, and proof that everybody was figuring out the AI build process in real time.

What Data Visualization & Interactions Means

This was not a mandate to recreate Tableau. The theme was about taking data that already lives somewhere — a CSV, an API, a form submission, a stream — and making it legible. The interaction layer could be as simple as filtering, scrubbing, clicking, dragging, sorting, or otherwise letting someone manipulate the view.

The other requirement was to show the messy middle. A good Week 1 entry did not hide the failed attempts, the library detours, or the moment when D3 tried to eat an entire Sunday. The story of the build mattered because the sprint was as much about learning velocity as the finished screen.

Starter Ideas

These were examples, not constraints. The useful pattern was: choose a dataset, expose a relationship, and add one interaction that makes the data easier to understand.

Listening history dashboard

Turn personal Spotify history into a small dashboard that reveals habits over time.

Climate scrubber

Chart CO2 levels and let viewers scrub across decades instead of staring at a static line.

Drag-and-drop sorter

Let people sort, filter, and rearrange a dataset directly in the browser.

Real-time stream view

Visualize sensor data, social data, or any live feed that benefits from motion and recency.

One useful business chart

Build a focused chart that does one practical thing well with smooth interactions.

Operating principle: complexity is the enemy. Shipping is the game. Do not get trapped shopping for tools when the point is to make a small, real thing.

What Did Not Count

The kickoff drew a clear line around avoidance patterns. “I’m still researching frameworks,” “I need to finish my Udemy course first,” and “I have a six-week idea” were all signs that the scope was wrong. Week 1 rewarded momentum, not elaborate prework.

Rules Reminder

Scoreboard updates landed Monday at noon. Public receipts mattered, and the scoring model made that explicit.

Base points

  • LinkedIn post — 5
  • Personal blog — 2
  • Substack post — 2
  • YouTube video, 5+ minutes with picture-in-picture — 15

Multipliers

  • Public repo — 1×
  • Hosted app plus public repo — 2×
  • No public code — 0×

Bonus points

  • +10 for referencing another competitor’s work
  • +10 for staying clearly inside the data visualization theme

The Real Win

Yes, there were medals for the top three. But the bigger prize was momentum. Five weeks of public shipping changes the default question from “what if this is not good enough?” to “what did I learn this time?” That shift builds a GitHub profile, a public record, and a healthier tolerance for uncomfortable early attempts.

The competition was scored with AI-assisted math rather than vibe-based judging. Build it, share it, collect the points, and move to the next rep.

Your Move

The Week 1 challenge was deliberately compressed: about six and a half days, enough time for something small and real. Not perfect. Real. Participants were encouraged to drop ideas in the group chat, riff from each other, reference each other’s builds, and make something simple enough to feel almost too small — then watch those reps compound over the full sprint.

Related Week 1 Builds

This is the canonical Week 1 theme prompt. The pages below are participant submissions and updates that came out of the Data Visualization & Interactions week, linked here so they stay connected without competing with the kickoff page.

ChartSlice

Myles Strait’s first-mover Week 1 submission.

OpenClaw Session Analyzer

A session X-ray dashboard for OpenClaw logs.

Calorie Tracker

A cross-platform calorie visualization app.

SkyStats — airplane visualizations

Kyle Sebestyen’s Week 1 aircraft intelligence dashboard with a Three.js globe, filters, charts, and flight-path visual signals.

Audio FFT Visualizer

A Week 1 audio visualization bonus build.

Astromech Splicer Panel

Eric’s second Week 1 multi-agent audio visualizer.

Crypto Dashboard

A live data dashboard that references ChartSlice.

Competition Update 2/12

An early Week 1 standings snapshot.

Source & Subscribe

This page adapts Eric’s original AdvisoryHour Substack kickoff, “Week 1: Data Visualization & Interactions”, into the Spring into AI archive on EricRhea.com. For the original thread context and future posts, visit AdvisoryHour on Substack.