DS27 are approaching our last few weeks of training at The Data School, this week we had our final client project, Alteryx refresher sessions and worked with survey data.
Monday: We started the week with our client project kickoff call. This week we were working on Tableau Prep. We were tasked with creating prep-flows and producing visualisations on a range of publicly available datasets with a view to making life easier for the Tableau community at large. We had the whole day after the kick off meeting to source our datasets and get to work transforming the data into a Tableau friendly format.
Tuesday: This morning we had a session with Robbin on Alteryx server, we created a small app that allowed the user to identify UFO sightings across a number of states (the truth is out there), and published those apps to the gallery. Interesting topic with a quirky dataset but this was a hugely useful session which we will definitely be drawing on when we go out on placements. The afternoon was reserved for more work on our Prep flows and visualisations.
Wednesday: We had an Alteryx refresher session today with Ollie where we covered topics we felt we needed more work on. Spatial tools and API's were the most requested topics. We spent a good portion of the day working with the travel time API and documentation before building out some isochrones - essentially a map of travel times from a particular location to a destination based on time taken to travel, leave time, arrive time and method of transport. This was a fun way to cement our learning of some of the more tricky Alteryx topics.
Thursday: In the morning we had Andy teaching us how to work with survey data, which was interesting and provoked a lot of discussion in the group around how and when best to use different weighting methodologies. The afternoon was left for finalising our dashboards ready for our client presentation on Friday.
Friday: After a bit more time for formatting in the morning DS27 prepared for their presentation, we had some of the fantastic folks from the Tableau Prep development team attend the call which allowed us to share our visualisations and feedback directly which was a great experience. Carlo was PM for this week and he did a great job motivating and giving support to the team whilst we were all mostly working remotely. The whole team delivered a great project which really captured the interest of the Tableau Prep dev team and was great fun for us to work on too. Special mention to here for Matty who did some very cool work this week on the movement of celestial bodies using Python and Tableau Prep. He can explain it much better than I can so check out his blog on the topic here https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/matty-sweet/the-beginners-guide-to-python-in-tableau-prep-builder
