About

Hi, I’m Josh

Here I will be discussing all things data, Tableau and most particularly, Alteryx. I’ll be posting blogs on all kinds of things from business use cases to pub crawls. I hope you find my blogs fun, educational or even inspirational in helping you explore more about the wonderful insights we can obtain from data.

My data journey can be broken down into three main milestones:

  • My love for data
  • My love for Alteryx
  • Passing the Alteryx Expert Exam

I became fascinated with data as a part-time cocktail bartender studying History at unviersity. I love cocktails. Not just drinking them but also how you can use all kinds of ingredients and adjust their amounts to create a completely unique taste. I loved making them, juggling making 10 Pornstar Martinis in one go whilst also dancing to Raining Men by The Weather Girls on the bar top. However, outside of work and university I enjoyed looking at the data behind the cocktails in my Excel spraedsheets… as any normal university student would. My first personal project looked at how much alcohol was in each cocktail and compared them to their prices to essentially work out hte cheapest way to get drunk at the bar. And that’s how I became to fall in love with data. I found it so fascinating at how you can use all this random information to gain all kinds of insights in life and how there is so much out there yet to be found out.

P.S. It’s not the Long Island Iced Tea.

The second milestone was the discovery of Alteryx and Tableau. The first thing I thought when I started using these tools was, “Wow, I wasted so much time doing my data anlaysis on Excel”. It was amazing how much more I could accelerate my work using Alteryx and its very visual features made it so much easier to investigate your data better. I truly became into Alteryx at Inspire 2018 after watching the Grand Prix which is a competition where the top Alteryx users race by solving questions by building Alteyrx workflows as quickly as possible. I was thinking to myself that I want to be there next year and win it. And that’s how I committed myself into learning Alteryx as much as possible. I completed as many Alteryx Weekly Challenges as possible and you should still be able to see my name at the top these days. I also did all kinds of personal fun projects like Fantasy Football data. I hope I can show my workings to you as much as possible through this blog.

A year passed and it was finally the moment I was waiting for, Alteryx Inspire 2019. After all this hard work and training I could finally realise my goal. Did I win it? Nope, I couldn’t even compete. Unfortunately, I had just moved to an Alteyrx Partner and Partners could no longer take part in the competition regardless of whether they qualified or not. Nevertheless, another amazing thing happened that day. I passed the Alteryx Expert Exam on my first attempt! I believe I was one of around 17 people that had ever passed the exam globally. I couldn’t believe it at the time and I was so ecstatic at the news. It reaffirmed that my efforts into learning Alteryx paid off and I am determined to keep learning as much as possible. It was a shame that I couldn’t compete in the Grand Prix, but then again watching the nervous contestants on stage whilst I relaxed with a beer in one hand and a spring roll in the other wasn’t too bad either.