As a more general question - when you are manipulating data in the field, am I right in thinking there are little tricks/shortcuts that everyone uses to arrange things such that you can easily visualise things - Or do you end up modelling everything properly up front?

For example, I have a series of Tasks (that I can pull out of a tracking system as JSon). This tool doesn’t model things very well (and this is where the msg from Esug stuck in my head - we have malleable tools that can do things more easily than others can).

So for example, the titles of the tasks have been entered with "XXXX: Some description” - so XXX is a type of category (so its a string). I have created a Task class to wrap the Json data and I created a method #category to parse this out - but its just a string at the moment.

Now looking at your example, I could visualise the Y axis as being these tasks (but they are strings) - so I would need to put them in something that I can send the #valueX msgs to, to get the x values. I could put them in a Dictionary with key “category” and value being the Task object. Can I then use blocks for the #valueX msgs? as in:   b value1: [ :task | task estimate]; b value2: [ :task | task duration ]?

I’m trying to get a feel around how you guys work?

I have also just started reading the Roassal pdf and I guess the Moose pdf as well - as I think its going to take me a while to figure out how to use these tools like you guys have amazed me with.