Introduction

Five years have come and gone since I started writing 3danim8’s Blog. That took a lot of time, dedication, and effort to write over 320 articles.

Now the time has come for me to decommission 3danim8’s Blog and begin a new website. There are a few reasons why this is the case, as I will explain in this article.

Saying Goodbye to 3danim8’s Blog

Making a major change to a blog isn’t necessarily a good thing because it takes years to develop a following of readers. Making a change isn’t necessarily easy to do, either. However, I wanted to do it because I have big ambitions for my upcoming work. I also do not worry about readership. I write my articles to teach and inspire, and whether anyone reads what I write is immaterial. I make no money doing this work and I am not looking for recognition, so those items are not factors either.

By switching from the safety and security of the WordPress.com platform and moving to a self-hosted WordPress website, I now have more freedom in publishing my work. This will allow me to add content that I currently cannot publish on WordPress.com. I will have more control over the types of content that I can add to the articles, and that will be a good thing. I will be able to have more dynamic content and a much wider variety of file types and downloadable content for people to use.

The good news is that by staying with WordPress as a content management system, I was able to migrate all of my content from 3danim8’s Blog to the new website. That involved moving about 10 Gigabtyes of articles, videos, images, and other content to the new website. The entire history of 3danim8’s Blog is still there and all you have to do to read the historical articles is to go to the new website.

After much thought and deliberation, I decided to name my new website Data Blends, and this is its location: datablends.us.

Saying Hello to Data Blends

I chose the name Data Blends for my new website because I realized that over the past decade, I have been getting better at using blended data to solve advanced problems. I have learned many techniques for getting the most out of data sets that were never intended to be used together.

Solving many modern analytics problems requires the use of multiple data sources, and the key to success in many projects lies in the ability to rapidly and comprehensively blend data. Not only do you have to be able to perform the technical operations to blend the data, you have to possess the vision and creativity to imagine putting the data pieces together.

When you assemble a jigsaw puzzle, you start with individual pieces. These pieces are like data files and each piece has its own characteristics. To solve the puzzle, you have to identify how the pieces fit together so that they support each other and begin to form a picture (Figure 1). Each piece offers something unique to the whole picture, just like individual data files do for the complete analytics solution you are striving to achieve.

Figure 1 – The placement of jigsaw pieces reminds me of joining/blending data files. Each piece offers something to the whole picture, but you can’t visualize the completed puzzle without finishing the work and stepping back to see the completed picture. Great software like Alteryx and Tableau allow us to blend disparate data, and this capability has extended our abilities to solve challenging analytic problems using data.

Once you assemble all the pieces, the work is finished and the complete picture can be visualized. By using a tool like Alteryx to assemble the pieces, you can send the completed (i.e., blended dataset) to a tool like Tableau to visualize the solution (Figure 2). The good news is that it usually doesn’t take 1,000 data files to form the complete picture like in this puzzle, but learning the techniques of how to formulate a plan and properly assemble the data does take time and project experience to achieve.

Figure 2 – The completed puzzle. In this case, every piece of this puzzle has a unique shape, which makes these types of puzzles even more challenging to complete. Every data science job is like that, too, because every project has unique characteristics and challenges to overcome.

The Road Ahead on Data Blends

If you have been a reader of 3danim8’s Blog, you will realize that I have been innovating over the past few years by learning new things. The nature of what I write about in 2018 does not necessarily mirror what I wrote about beginning in 2013. I moved from documenting specific Tableau techniques, to showing data examples in Tableau, to documenting Alteryx techniques, to documenting problem-solving approaches in Alteryx. During these changes in focus, I interwove stories and themes throughout time. 3danim8’s Blog was like a long-lasting novel that I wrote as I progressed throughout my career as I learned to use Alteryx and Tableau with great success.

One of the themes I wrote about involved Arnold Schwarzenegger. He is in multiple stories for good reason. He has shown me (starting in the 1970s) that anything is possible in life if you are willing to work hard enough to achieve your dreams. If you have seven minutes, I strongly encourage you to watch Arnold discuss his strategy for becoming successful in the video shown below.

Arnold’s five rules for success are shown in the list below. Although I first heard of them last night, I quickly realized that I am a person that follows these rules. I suspect that many readers of this blog follow these, too.

1. Find your vision and follow it
2. Never think small, think big
3. Ignore the naysayers
4. Work your ass off
5. Don’t just take, give something back

In thinking about these five rules, I realized that I have employed all of them in writing 3danim8’s Blog. I could go into detail about how and why that is true, but what I really want to say is that my future work on Data Blends will also be driven by these rules.

The changes coming to the new website are many, with exciting new topics and problem-solving techniques emerging from my work. We will enter the mysterious world of machine learning/artificial intelligence. We will explore a more expansive coverage of predictive analytics. The challenges for me will be diverse, complex, and will require a significant time investment for me to achieve. In the end, however, I know it will be worth the effort.

Thanks for reading 3danim8’s Blog! I hope you continue to read Data Blends to learn about these new topics. I promise to send a few surprises your way, as well as continuing to focus on the best software available for rapid problem solving: Alteryx and Tableau.