Community Update: v1 release date, rebrand, & new home

[hshoff]

The News

• Release date: v1 will be released Tuesday, September 22nd
• Rebrand: vx will rebrand to visx for v1. @vx/* packages will always and forever be published so your code won’t break with this change. You just need to change @vx/*: ^0.0.199 => @visx/*: ^1.0.0 in package.json after v1 release and update any css selectors .vx-* => .visx-*.
• New home: our new home will be github.com/airbnb/visx. GitHub says that this project ownership change won’t break anything and we’ll keep git history, issues, and pull-requests. The only real change here is vx is graduating to the Airbnb GitHub organization with the v1 release.

Read on for details.

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After 3 years of active development and production use at Airbnb, I’m happy to share that v1 is right around the corner. You may see a few house-keeping PRs over the coming days as we begin final preparations for the release. My hope is that this community update will provide some early guidance for the upcoming changes and answer any questions about why we’re making these changes.

V1

Turns out v0.0.199 was the v1 release. Woo! We’ve been carefully planning this release and there are no big API changes between vx@0.0.199 and visx@1.0.0 other than the name change. Be sure to update your stylesheets if you use the .vx-* css selectors to .visx-*. This is the only breaking change. Other than that, it should be a happy upgrade path. As always, we’ll update the changelog when v1 is released.

Rebrand

It probably surprises nobody that vx was always a placeholder name. I knew I wanted to make visualization components and it needed to be open source. Sometimes people use x to stand for components -- vx. It was nice and short. And most importantly, the @vx scope on npm was available. The stars aligned.

While vx is short for visualization components, it has problems as a project name. It’s a nerve agent which is scary, toxic, and awful, so that’s not good. It’s hard to search for. Naming collisions. It’s a common variable name… oof

Fortunately, the opportunity presented itself with the v1 release to take a moment and revisit the long-term vision for the project and the name. A fresh start.

The new name is visx. It’s still short for visualization components. We’ve just added 2 letters.

The new logo is a big X. the idea is 4 rotated "v" s make the "x" as a nod to the original name vx. The faded spokes/edges makes it dynamic. You either see the light extending into the monitor, like diving into the void or as something emerging/bursting through the X.

A docs site design refresh is in the works also.

New Home

This project came out of discussions @williaster and I had about the future of data visualization at Airbnb (we both work there on different teams). We always planned for the project to eventually land under the Airbnb GitHub organization, but we wanted to make sure that it met Airbnb’s high standard for open source projects. This meant taking our time to get it right. Now that we’re finally ready to promote the project out of beta status and release v1, it’s the right time to make the move.

Stay tuned for the v1 announcement on September 22nd and give @AirbnbEng a follow twitter, medium, and instagram for updates.

Big thanks to all of you. Whether you’ve been following along over the past couple of years or just discovering us, we’re happy you’re here.

[hshoff]

• Blog announcement: Introducing visx from Airbnb
• New home: https://airbnb.io/visx