In the last decade, data has grown in importance as more and more individuals and companies collect information about themselves and their customers. Data visualization as a field has also grown as we try to make sense of and find patterns within that data. And advancements in web - with SVG, Canvas, and the creation of D3.js - has made communicating those insights ever easier. Despite all this, data visualization is still very niche, with low adoption from the main front end community. Data sketches is a project between Shirley Wu and Nadieh Bremer, where we choose a topic, build a visualization of it and write about our process. In this talk, I will share my favorite months of data, sketches, and code: what made them my favorites, the mistakes I made along the way, and the lessons I learned from them. By sharing these lessons, I hope to encourage the front end community to go out and find their own data to build their own unique visualizations of, so that they can experience firsthand how fun and rewarding it could be.