James Harding's flight stats turned a pilot logbook into GitHub-style graphs

James Harding, a British Airways first officer on the Airbus A350, has logged every flight since joining the airline's cadet scheme in 2014. But the record lived inside LogTen Pro, a proprietary app whose data most pilots never turn into anything visible again.

Rather than posting a list of airports, Harding queried the app's SQLite database directly: his July 2024 write-up shows the SQL view that exposes dates, routes, aircraft, crew positions and times from LogTen's internal store, powering the realtime statistics on his site.

One dataset then feeds a dozen interactive views, including a GitHub-style calendar of hours flown, destination matrices, scatter plots where the asymmetry of westerly winds on transatlantic trips is visible, radiation and CO2 estimates, and 3D globes of routes, all tied to a single filter so visitors can slice his career as data. The contribution-graph idiom is instantly readable to a programming audience, which is exactly the audience he reached.

The launch page drew 1,539 points and 197 comments on Hacker News on 27 June 2025 and landed on third-party best-of lists for Show HN projects; commenters and emailers suggested further charts, and he kept adding them.

Render personal data in the grammar your audience already reads

Digitizing every flight from the start created one complete, queryable dataset instead of scattered records.

Reading LogTen's SQLite store directly beat CSV exports, giving him the raw fields realtime graphs need without vendor lock-in.

Familiar idioms such as the GitHub contribution calendar let programmers read a stranger's career in seconds.

A global filter binds every chart to the same slice of data, so exploration is one click instead of per-graph setup.

He treated the Hacker News thread as product feedback, shipping the charts people requested and compounding one launch into ongoing content.

Capture data once in a queryable form so one dataset feeds many views, then translate it into the visual grammar your audience already knows before you ask for their attention.

After the June 2025 launch Harding kept the page updated and credited many of the charts to suggestions from Hacker News comments and emails. The project expanded into an interactive flight-by-flight logbook with a mini globe per route, and he signaled plans to keep publishing aviation material aimed at technical readers, with an RSS feed and social accounts attached. Aggregators still list the post among the highest-scoring Show HN projects of 2025.