Training for DSNY 4 is over. Those 4 months flew by.
The beginning of training felt slow paced with a lot of review topics for me. Having gone through a bootcamp involving Tableau and self teaching myself a bit leading up to me applying for DSNY4 some of the early days were I didn't learn much new besides some cool shortcuts for how to do things in Tableau. The things I was looking forwarded to getting into are interactivity, table calculations, level of detail calculations, and Alteryx.
Lets go in to the main topics/tools covered in training.
Tableau Prep - I actually kind of liked prep when we were first introduced to it. It was a way more convenient method of preparing data than the manual ways I have worked with until that point. The ui feels pretty welcoming and straight forward as well compared to Alteryx , which I briefly tried to work out before training for that started without much success. Didn't cover it much in training but did come up a lot during our client projects.
Basic Alteryx - Learning Alteryx in 4 days with the core exam at the end of the week was interesting. Now that I had some guidance instead of just trying to jump in by myself it wasn't to bad. The basics came to me quickly . I originally planned to do tons of challenges with my spare time but that did not happen. On that first week of learning when we took the core exam it was kind of exhausting. I felt pretty confident going in that I understood things but with the number of questions and the 2 hour time limit I finished the test not knowing if I'd pass with around a 70% or in the 90% range. I scored somewhere in the mid 90s but in my head it could have easily gone either way.
Tableau - The beginning was kind of slow but I really liked paper tableau. Paper tableau is where you try to figure out what pills need to go where and what settings need to be set on a whiteboard, wireframe, or tableau with it paused to get a better understanding of how tableau works. I really liked the problem solving aspect of it which is a common theme for the areas of the training I enjoyed.
Interactivity - My favorite part of Tableau. I love how you can show so many different slices of things in a limited space with interactivity. Actions beyond filter actions is something I didn't know much about before data school. Learning about set and parameter actions has really helped to expand on my ideas for interactivity.
Table Calcs/Lods - This is a topic that I feel stuck on for a bit, feel like I've figured out, then get stuck on again. I quickly picked up the portions related to training. Then got stuck with trying to figure out some Workout Wednesdays. Then I felt like I understood things and got stuck again when trying to do some of the complicated calculations related to my gaming data and personal projects. However Val helped a ton with these despite not understanding the game at all lol.
Regex - This is something I didn't know about before Data School but feels like I haven't stopped using it since learning it. Feel pretty confident with it.
Webscraping/API - Picked these up somewhat quickly and reinforced that I have a decent understanding of the topics with Dashboard week. Going back to these topics without much review was mostly smooth for me. Looking forward to exploring more with these as I have more time.
Client Projects:
For the first couple of client projects I gravitated mostly towards data prep for the team. To the point where there were 3 or 4 weeks in a row where I didn't make a dashboard or just made a quick basic dashboard in the last 2 days after working on something else. After that I was banned from the data prep portion somewhat and focused on dashboards again.
Next Steps:
There are some really cool dashboards other member of DSNY 4 have made throughout clients projects I plan on using as practice. Similar to a workout wednesday I plan to learn how to make them.
Alteryx Challenges - did not get to do nearly as many of these as I planned. Switching to a hybrid schedule instead of being in everyday should give me more time to do so.
Another reason to do more challenges which I planned to do anyway is my first placement will be an Alteryx focused one at QBE. Happy that my first placement is with Alteryx since it is a slight preference of mine and something I feel more comfortable with but I do need to make sure I keep up with my Tableau skills.
Personal Projects - Have yet to put together my 3rd version of my Slay the Spire dashboard which has received thousands of views and excited to implement the things I learned during training and compare to the first two version. I was also told my Tableau public was looking weak and lacked business dashboards since all of them I have worked on have been for clients. So plan to work on a few of those.
Overall looking forward to working on a more long term project.