Why build something for yourself when it is already out there? Open source has seen a massive adoption over the past couple of years, where thousands of projects sprung out of nowhere and were made available to the community for free, to share knowledge and collaboratively develop code bases.

While you should technically be able to develop your code from scratch, conscious of time-to-market and efficiency, I am a firm believer of looking at what is already out there and taking some snippets of available code to speed up your development.

The two most relevant platforms where you can find useful open source code for your projects are Qlik Branch, Qlik's open source platform with visualizations and components revolving exclusively around the Qlik APIs, and bl.ocks, which is a rich collection of open source visualizations based on d3.