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 pre-launch 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.

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.

While I was working as Tech Lead my main priority was ensuring the long-term health and sustainable maintenance of the visualisation code. One major project was migrating our codebase to a monorepo, where previously each visualisation and shared component was managed in completely independent repositories. Alongside the custom CI/CD pipeline and tools I introduced, this lead to a doubling of the release rate across the team without leading to a decline in quality or successful releases.

This work necessitated developing custom testing solutions for our visualisations and establishing best practices for testing within the team, in a domain that typically lacks the clear testing standards found in more traditional frontend web development.