Introduction
When I start writing an article, I normally begin with the title. In this case, I can’t determine the title because the emotional content of this story is too overpowering for me to decide at this time.
In 2019, there were many highs in my life and a couple of lows, including a four-month back injury that caused me to miss the Tableau conference. That injury sucked, and I’m thankful that it is now in the rear-view mirror.
This article will be positive and focused on one of my highlights in 2019. I hope you enjoy the story.
Hello World!
Colton is my stepson by marriage, but he is my son by every other measure. I first met him when he was a darling 8-month-old baby boy. This is what he looked like in 1996, with those pudgy cheeks and incredible dimples.
This is what he looks like now in 2019 at 23 years old, and 6 foot 3 inches of pure young man awesomeness.
Colton’s Story
I just spent an hour reviewing Colton’s life by scanning through thousands of pictures of him in my Google Photos collection. What I saw has made me very proud of him.
His life has been full of learning, exploring, being an athlete, traveling, and being a kind and good person. I am afraid that I will not be able to find the words that describe how much pleasure and pride that he has brought to our family.
In picture form, I just watched Colton grow from that baby to a talented young man that has a bright future ahead of him. Colton has lived a full life, having traveled abroad many times as well as exploring the lower 48 states. Colton is now ready to grow into adulthood, and that is the topic of this story.
2019 Was A Great Year For Me and My Family
For me, 2019 was another great year. I achieved a significant professional achievement that I am very proud of. After a decade of dedication to the Tableau community, I was pleasantly surprised to be named a Tableau Zen Master. Coupled with my multi-year Alteryx Ace award, this made me possibly the third person to have achieved this dual designation. I am honored and privileged to join my good friends Joe Mako and Chris Love as enthusiastic promotors of these great software companies.
I have spent about seven years writing hundreds of stories in this blog about the combined brilliance of Tableau and Alteryx (TabAlt – which rhymes with basalt) and how these companies have inspired me. The combined capabilities of TabAlt empowered me to achieve seemingly impossible insights in data that I could not have achieved before learning these tools. These capabilities have created great professional opportunities for me.
The reason I am mentioning this topic in my story about Colton is that my enthusiasm for Tableau and Alteryx has been passed down to Colton. For this to have happened, I am very happy and proud. It isn’t often that our kids decide to really listen to us as parents, but when it happens, it is very fulfilling.
If you are a reader of this blog, you will remember Colton as my protagonist in stories like these:
Those stories told a few tales of Colton’s journey from pre-school through his undergraduate years as he pursued a BS degree in Business Analytics at the University of Tennessee. His curriculum, with a supply chain management focus, was not an easy one. In fact, that business analytics program he graduated from is ranked number seven in the country!
I can attest to the high degree of difficulty in his courses because I had the privilege of watching him grow and learn over those years. I also was able to work with him as I taught him how to accomplish things in TabAlt that he was doing in his classes in SQL, Excel, R, JMP, and other software programs. I pushed him to expand his horizons, to see all the beauty offered by TabAlt. These experiences included showing him things like using the R and Python predictive packages in Alteryx to compete in multiple Kaggle competitions.
A Nice Way to Start a Career
Apparently, Colton listened to me and he saw for himself how TabAlt can give us data superpowers! Upon graduation in May of 2019, Colton earned an internship with a company called Misty Robotics in Boulder, Colorado.
Over the course of three months, I directed him and another student on a project that was very ambitious and technically challenging. The goal was to build a comprehensive analytics platform for Misty Robotics that would allow the employees of the company to have visibility into how the Misty Robots were being used by their owners. Specifically, we needed to build an analytics platform that was capable of quantifying how the robots were used day by day and over time.
For most newbies of Tableau and Alteryx, it can be overwhelming to learn the basics of each software package. Normally it takes many months to learn either package. Now imagine that your first professional job featured the following challenges in TabAlt.
Alteryx Challenges
- Write workflows that are flexible, accurate and perform many computations.
- The robotics engineering team can change data structures for the information being collected from hundreds of robots. This requires rapid and thorough communication and a sound understanding of the meaning of data fields and the ability to adjust workflows to new data structures.
- Be able to retrieve specific data from the Amazon Web Services Athena and S3 platforms.
- Write Alteryx workflows that can incrementally update the master database, which has grown to over 50 million records in about six months.
- Learn how to optimize workflows to improve query performance, computational efficiency, and to be self-documented.
- Learn how to do API calls to recover unstructured data that will be needed in your workflows.
- Learn how to use important tools in Alteryx like the Google Sheet connector and the Publish to Tableau Server tool.
- Learn how to write workflows that have multiple batch processes running to accomplish multiple levels of aggregation for various key measures.
- Learn how to create, document and test an Alteryx server instance on the Amazon Web Services platform.
- Finally, your primary workflow has to create the data sources for seven distinct Tableau workbooks. Imagine the book-keeping that is needed for that!
Tableau Challenges
- Create at least seven distinct Tableau workbooks, some of which have multiple dashboards.
- Determine how to use Tableau Server, followed by a migration to Tableau Online.
- Create a customized company color scheme that is used across all dashboards you developed.
- Learn the roles of parameters, multiple filter styles, labeling, annotation, incorporating images and all the other intricacies of Tableau.
- Automatically link the hyper files you created in Alteryx to either the internal Tableau Server or the Tableau Online service.
- Document all the dashboards, including defining the key measures and the overall intent of each creation.
What Does All That Mean?
What this means is that Colton graduated in May and by August, he learned how to create a complete analytics platform that features custom data sources created in Alteryx that are displayed in Tableau dashboards. He also learned what it means to be both a Tableau and Alteryx server administrator, including servers both locally and in the cloud. At the end of the three months, he documented the entire analytics platform in a final report. I’d say that is a nice start to a career.
So What Happened Next?
The Misty Robotics team appreciated Colton’s work so much that they extended his work for another six months. During this time, Colton has continued to maintain the analytics framework by routinely running the workflows, updating the dashboards, and responding to specific questions by creating additional custom data sets.
All of this work was completed in an Agile project management setting using modern tools such as Slack, Trello, Hubspot, and other project collaboration tools. Just last month, Colton was instrumental in rebuilding the workflows to connect to a completely new data structure that was installed on AWS.
My Hope For Colton’s Future
As Colton’s time with Misty Robotics will soon be coming to an end, it is my hope that he is able to find a job that uses both Alteryx and Tableau. Since he is young and free, he has the capability to relocate and pursue his passions. My wife and I are excited to see our son launch his career directly on the heels of his sister Sarah, who just began her career as an occupational therapist working with kids!
Call To Action!
If anyone knows of an open job that requires Alteryx and Tableau knowledge, please let me know. We would like Colton to be able to pursue his passions in data analytics and visualization.
I can assure you that he has had excellent training and has shown keen abilities in both packages. You don’t even have to take my word for it – Colton already has several other professional references that are available upon request. Thanks much for reading!
