Hi! My name is Cristina Alexa. I am a freelance data visualization developer, working from Cluj-Napoca, România, with a background in cartography and web development.

Work saga - crafting maps and solving bugs for real estate websites

Let me tell you a bit about myself and how Data Visualization has become an important part of my life. In 2008 I graduated as a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Planner from the 'Babes-Bolyai' University from Cluj-Napoca. Looking for a GIS-related career, I worked as a GIS Analyst at Micro Mapper for 3 years.

It took me a while to figure out that, although I liked doing spatial analysis, I loved the interactive map visualizations on the web. In my spare time I started teaching myself about the subject of web mapping. A year later in 2010 I got the opportunity to join Property Shark as a Cartographer. There I worked on Web based mapping & Spatial data and information management for one year.

After a while, because of my interest in programming I was given the opportunity to work in other departments as Business Analyst, then as Web Developer. I worked on researching, analizing and visualizing large amounts of real-estate data, back-end web development, RESTful web services, continuous integration, sometimes front-end development tasks.

However, after eight years I figured out that I was more interested in the visual exploration part of web programming, than in the web maintenance. Therefore, I quit my job to become a data visualization developer and map maker, and craft unique 3D maps visualizations. I started teaching myself more about the subject of data visualization and JavaScript programming, and I also started creating personal projects.

I also got qualified as Front End Web Developer (Udacity - 2021) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Specialist (Coursera - 2019).

Freelancing saga - applying the freelance data visualization developer skills

My projects include web-based data visualizations. But they are mostly focused on storytelling, interactive maps & data visualizations, and animations, than on static data art.

Besides creating visualizations for the web, I love to perform GIS analysis on open-source data, and 3D terrain analysis on LiDAR derived images.

Also, I create web design systems, handle web development & integration for my projects, and manage web hosting for them.

Feel free to check out examples of my projects at Playground, and the ideas behind them on this very blog.

One of my ongoing projects is DatavizRomania. I have started it to record my journey of learning data visualization and share it with the data visualization community in România.

If you're interested in my projects & experiments, please feel free to contact me to find out how we might work together.

Why MapTheClouds? The clouds I was referring are not ‘point clouds’, but the idea that you can (and must) approach any phenomenon surrounding us, no matter how impossible it may seem. Sky is the limit. ⛅