On November 20, the New York Times released “Vigils in Paris”—a virtual reality film that captured a city in mourning after the terror attacks a week earlier. It was the first VR project from the Times produced completely in-house. Graham Roberts, senior graphics editor at the Times, spoke with us over email about how they made it, and what the future of VR looks like.

As we did last year, we’ve asked a couple of dozen people from all around the news-nerd community to tell us about one thing—article, feature, app, tool, or something else entirely—that they loved in 2015. This week, we’re publishing their responses, from interactives to project management software. We hope you find here at least one thing that eases your work, inspires new angles on your stories, and helps carry you through to 2016.

A few last meetups before the end of the year, and plenty of conferences looking for your submissions in 2016.

“End the elections arms race” has become a rallying cry in American data journalism. Many newsrooms spend tremendous resources writing code to simply load and parse election data. It’s time we stopped worrying about the plumbing and started competing on the interesting parts. We decided it was time we put some code against our beliefs – our contribution is a tool we’re calling Elex. And it needs your help, too.

The annual YAN hackathon in Armenia is happening this weekend, plus lotsa meetups.

At the New York Times, the Interactive News team wants to build tools that make the world of analytics more accessible to newsroom teams. Earlier this year, members of the team began working on Google Analytics Dashboard (GADash), an app-specific display of key figures, traffic patterns, and charts for some of our custom story presentations, as well as general page reports.

Here’s a few things that made us pause, over the past few weeks: beautiful, haunting, or otherwise fascinating pieces from the journalism code universe.

Tonight, join The Coral Project at Hacks/Hackers New York. Plus, meetups around the world and several conference and fellowship deadlines are fast approaching.

As data journalists, we tend to focus on visualizing our numbers as beautifully and comprehensively as possible for desktops. We pour over D3.js line charts. We spend hours getting the tooltips on our maps to look just right. And right before our deadlines, we’ll throw in some CSS media queries for mobile screens and call it a day. I know I’ve been a culprit of this method more than once. One of my favorite sessions at Mozilla Festival this year was Aaron Williams’ “Crafting New Visualization Techniques for Mobile Web” where he emphasized a mobile-first, desktop-second focus to data visualization.

Lots of talk proposal deadlines coming up soon, OSCON, OpenVis Conf, Responsible Data Forum, and more.

Show and tell this week from the Los Angeles Times Data Desk, plus lots of other meetups.

Whether in the Bay Area or elsewhere across the country, stories about gentrification tend to reduce the dynamics to one narrative. Newcomers displace longtime residents, erasing history, shifting the economy, and disrupting culture in the process. Focusing on West Oakland, the Youth Radio team behind West Side Stories wanted to surface the many nuanced and sometimes conflicting stories sparked by extreme neighborhood change. Here’s what they made.

Latoya Peterson creates all kinds of groundbreaking digital work with Fusion. We spoke with Peterson about her Mental Map project, an interactive series that traces and celebrates creative roots.

Here’s a quick look at some cool projects, beautiful interactives, and other wonderful things that we lingered over this month, ICYMI.

Over the last several months, the New York Times R&D Lab has been thinking about the future of online communities, particularly those communities and conversations that form around news organizations and their journalism. When we think about community discussion, we typically think about comments sections below our articles, or outside forums that link to our content (Twitter, Reddit, etc.). But what comes after free-text comments? To explore this further, we developed Membrane, which is an experiment in permeable publishing. By permeable publishing, we mean a new form of reading experience, in which readers may “push back” through the medium to ask specific, contextual (and constrained) questions of the author.

This week, the Mozilla Festival descends on London. Join us at MozFest or related events.

Meet agate, a Python data analysis library optimized not for performance, but for the performance of the human who is using it. That means focusing on designing code that is easy to learn, readable, and flexible enough to handle any weird data you throw at it. Here’s why you should try it.

A bunch of meetups this week, plus applications are now for the Philip Meyer Award for data journalism.

On October 19, the Guardian published Homan Square: A Portrait of Chicago’s Detainees as a part of its ongoing investigation into the Chicago Police Department’s alleged abuses of detainee rights at a warehouse facility on Chicago’s west side. We spoke with the Guardian interactive team responsible for the interactive feature, both in their NYC offices and via email.

This week Berliner Gazette hosts UNCOMMONS while organizers around Europe begin to prepare for hackathons related to refugees.