Introduction
I’ve been doing analytics in one form or another for my entire adult life. It is clear that quantitative studies are the fuel that propels me into the future.
Thanks to my buddies Allan Walker and Anya A’Hearn, I recently had a dream fulfilled in a way that is a strong indicator of the future of analytics. Of course, Alteryx, Tableau and Mapbox had a little to do with it, too!
Who is Allan Walker?
Allan and I have been friends for many years. Allan now works for Mapbox, the up-and-coming powerhouse company in the analytics space. If you don’t know about Mapbox, you better start paying attention. They are working on changing the playing field in geographically-based visual analytics (www.mapbox.com).
I have written about Allan before (click here) and he is a person with some very specialized skills. His skills allow him to envision a future in which mapping is combined with interactive dashboards that get built with custom data sources. These custom data sources typically get built with Alteryx.
Allan, more than any other person, reminds me of myself. We both have the ability to envision creative solutions and have the skills to bring these visions to fruition. We have the math and programming skills coupled with the work experience necessary to quickly design and implement a wide array of POCs (proof of concepts) across many disciplines.
What makes Allan so special, however, is that he has a passion for creating POC’s that handle massive data. He understands the need for large-scale, performant solutions that are driven by huge data sets. He knows how to use the power of Mapbox in combination with Tableau, Kepler, and Alteryx to create applications that are cutting-edge. Allan doesn’t limit himself in any way. His solutions might be 2D, 3D, 4D or even N-dimensional. The speed at which he can build these is incredible. Sometimes I have the privilege of writing the Alteryx workflows that help him fulfill his ideas.
Over the past year or so, Allan and I have been meeting every week to discuss concepts and to collaborate on special tasks. Today, we completed a dream of mine. It’s taken me five years to develop the data sets that fuel the dream; it took Allan a couple of hours to make my dream come true. This is one of the great aspects of collaboration. When you have talented and driven friends that are willing to help you, anything is possible.
My Analytics Dream – Application Approach #1
I am writing this article because of the passion Allan sent my way via a Google Hangout earlier today. The application we built for me is a part of my multi-year study on global warming. You can see what I mean by watching the video shown below. This application uses javascript coding combined with Mapbox functionality to retrieve dynamic Tableau dashboards. Of course, Alteryx was used to build the custom data sets being displayed.
My Analytics Dream – Application Approach #2
When Allan showed this application to Anya A’Hearn (she needs no introduction, if you know anything about Tableau/Data Blick/ and Awesomeness!), she was critical of the user experience. This functionality required a double click (one click to load the data, one click to unload the data) in the rendition that I showed in the first movie. She suggested to Allan that Tableau 2019.2 could perform almost the same functionality by using the vector maps now available, coupled with the viz-in-viz tooltip functionality.
The next day, Allan called me and we rebuilt this application completely in Tableau 2019.2. In the following video, I discuss the advantages and disadvantages that this gave us. Thanks to you, Anya, I got to learn a few new tricks in Tableau!
If you want to see how Global Warming is progressing in your state or if you want to test this application for yourself, click here.
Global Warming Near You
You can see how much global warming has occurred in your state between 1960 and 2017, for any day of the year.
To Learn More About This Global Warming Study
Next week I will be discussing these findings and showing the application that Allan built for me at the Alteryx Inspire Conference in Nashville, TN.
If you can answer yes to any of the following questions, then I strongly encourage you to attend my presentation on Thursday, June 13, 2019 at 10:30 am. The presentation title is something like: “Its Hot in Here…”
- Are you a living human being?
- Do you live on planet earth?
- Do you care about the future of mankind?
- Do you care about the future of your children?
- Have you heard of Global Warming?
Click here to read about my five-year study on global warming.
Thanks for reading!
