Flourish Company Examples

Flourish is a data visualisation and storytelling platform that was created to make it easy to author rich, animated and interactive visualisations without needing specialist programming knowledge. I started working with the company in 2017, and in the time since then I've seen the company grow from a small team through to acquisition by Canva in 2021, followed by their integration with a large international organisation. Until transferring to Canva, I worked as a Tech Lead for the templates team, which is responsible for creating and maintaining the site's visualisations.

As Tech Lead I made the long-term maintenance and health of the visualisation code a high priority. An early project I took on was to migrate the codebase to a monorepo, where previously each visualisation and shared component was managed in completely independent repositories. Combined with the custom CI/CD pipeline and tools I introduced, this lead to a doubling of the release rate across the team. Part of this work also necessitated developing custom testing solutions for our visualizations and establishing best practices for testing within our team, in a domain that typically lacks the clear testing standards found in traditional web development.

One major project in my time at Flourish was our map visualisation template for displaying geospatial data, which are built on top of Mapbox GL JS and include a custom WebGL layer for rendering large numbers of animated points and heatmaps using regl.

Other projects have included a 3D model viewer, server-side video export functionality, our 3D Globe template that complements our map templates, a responsive annotation system, and early explorations for the integration of Flourish and Canva.