Starting a new job is like a box of chocolates...
During the first week me and the rest of DS31 have been slowing chugging through the fundamental lessons of Alteryx and Tableau Prep. However, firstly we tackled the immense challenge of setting up our laptops for the with the necessary programs needed for the months ahead. Alongside this we had talks from members of the core team, including the founder Tom Brown, as well as some of the current students from different cohorts.
Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday came along and with them was the first introductions to both Tableau Prep and Alteryx. These sessions were mainly focussed on helping develop some basic skills which I would be able to use for the Friday challenge.
Both Alteryx and Tableau Prep are functionally the same program, they both manipulate any given data sets and can be used to tidy up huge quantities of data relatively quickly. The main differences between them are when you begin to look at some of the more advanced features such as web scraping and predictive modelling, which we have yet to get our hands on. From my first impressions, Tableau is a more basic version of Alteryx in terms of functionality, however, it's usability and accessibility for future clients is appealing to those who may be intimidated by Alteryx's bloated UI.
Friday was presentation day, we were sent the brief and given until after lunch to complete it and then present it to the rest of our cohort. Now I can't spoil what the actual task is for obvious reasons, but in essence it was to demonstrate some of the things we had learnt in the week. On the surface, my final product appeared to be quite basic but if you looked under the "hood" you could see the small edits I have make in order to manipulate the data to specific request.
That's about it for week 1 at the Data School, I hope to write some more insightful blogs in the future when I know a little more about the programs we use.
Thanks