Alter.Nation
Community news, customer stories, and more!
Welcome to the latest edition of Community Highlights! Your one stop shop for all things Alteryx Community. For first time readers, this ongoing blog series delivers a curated dose of the latest community happenings so that you can keep a pulse on what’s hot, who’s in, and all of the latest trends.
In Case You Missed It
*Community news & announcements.
@LordNeilLord, an extremely valuable top contributor and founding member of the unofficial and always growing weekly challenge fan club, took home the grand prix trophy at Inspire Europe! Congrats on the big win, Neil! You deserve it!
October 2019 Community Release
The latest Community release included several notable enhancements, including the addition of the polling feature, updating notifications, several bug fixes, and a much needed adjustment to the statuses on Product Ideas. Which included adding new statuses, consolidating similar/duplicate ones, and renaming existing ones to be more clear. Check out @TreyW's post to learn more about everything included in Alteryx Community October 2019 Release (v19.8).
Community Tips
@DanM and the Alteryx Community Operations team recently published some great new content designed to help you make the most of your community experience:
Browse additional getting started with Community articles in the Community Resources Knowledge Base.
Never. Stop. Learning.
*Alteryx Academy. All the training resources you need.
What’s New in Academy
Introducing Learning Paths
As we grow our volume of training content, we want to empower you with learning experiences that are purposefully prescribed, hands-on, and relevant to your application. We are thrilled to announce the launch of Learning Paths to guide your learning experience of the Alteryx Platform.
Now available in the Alteryx Academy, the Getting Started Learning Path provides a curriculum for our newest Alteryx users to explore the core tools of Alteryx Designer, practice their new skills, and demonstrate their abilities to solve real-world and industry-specific problems. With over 15 hours of content, 16 hands-on drills, 4 practice workflows and a capstone project, this curriculum solidly sets your foundation for building analytic solutions with Alteryx Designer.
During its beta release, we welcome your feedback - please use the Feedback button in Academy to provide information on your experience with the Learning Path. You may also share your experience with the Academy team at academy@alteryx.com.
New Interactive Lessons available in Japanese
@SaoriG's been hard at work localizing interactive lessons and earlier this week was excited to release the latest addition. The Alteryx For Excel users course is now available in the Japanese Community. Learn more about the Japanese lessons here: "Excel ユーザーのための Alteryx" コースが日本語で利用できるようになりました
Weekly Challenge
Every week, on the Weekly Challenge forum, we invite users to put their Alteryx skills to the test by solving a unique and fun use case. You'll be able to share your answers and collaborate with other challengers to arrive at an answer. Participation is rewarded!
Many thanks to our Community members who submitted ideas for challenges over the past several months. We've featured a few of our favorites here:
Challenge #181 | Ingredients of an Old Southern
This challenge comes to us from ACE @patrick_digan. Using the provided URL, download and parse the data in the recipe for an Old Southern. Create a list of the cocktail ingredients and measurements.
Whiskey (and other spirits) and analytics go surprisingly well together. Head on over to our Events page to join an evening of whiskey tasting and data sampling near you.
Challenge #183 | Roman Numeral Math
This challenge was shared by @LordNeilLord and @JReid from an original post by @AnandKumar1. This challenge includes two inputs:
1) An equation written in Roman numerals and
2) a look-up table of certain Roman numerals. Solve the equation and return the answer as an integer. Then, give yourself a high V!
Challenge #186 | Drilling Down into Data Analysis
This challenge comes to us from @Original_Yodies. For those of you who work in the energy sector, and specifically drilling, you'll get some industry-specific practice with this challenge!
Are there other Alteryx skills you’d like to put into practice? No problem. We’ve got you covered. You can browse all of the available challenges by difficulty and subject right here.
Meet the New Alteryx Certified Experts and Masters
We held four certification exams at Inspire Europe last month: Designer Expert, Spatial Master, Automation Master, and the new Predictive Master exam. We’re thrilled to announce who passed the exams and joined the elite group of Experts and Masters:
Congrats to @hannah-r, @cgoodman3, @abassett, @JoshuaGostick, @psilv, @jamielaird, @Niklas, and @danielbrun2!
Updates to the Advanced Exam
The Certification team has been working on refreshing the Alteryx Designer Advanced Exam!
The exam will still look very similar, but with some minor housecleaning and modifications. One change you will notice is that Gallery will no longer be covered on the Advanced Exam. In its place, you will see 5 questions on the exam on the Data Investigation tool palette. Designer has a tremendous array of predictive tools that users can apply to expand their analytics capabilities. Consider this our friendly nudge into the predictive end of the pool.
Check out the Certification page, Advanced Certification Prep – Part VI Video and the Advanced Certification Exam Prep Guide for more details.
Nuts & Bolts
The Difference: https://xkcd.com/242/
*Alteryx in Practice. Noteworthy Tips & Tricks, blog/KB Articles + other pearls of wisdom.
Let’s kick this section off with some pretty cool newly available functionality: Designer now supports sending emails via Gmail! Find out how over in the Designer Knowledge Base in How To: Send Emails Through Gmail Using the Alteryx Email Tool.
Over on the Engine Works blog prolific author @DavidHa adds another great piece in Tackling Queued Jobs With Queueing Theory - Part 1. This is my favorite type of article - a little bit of theory (L = λW... look - math!), and a little bit of good old practical advice - in this case, how to optimize your Server setup to get more jobs done faster.
For a little do-gooding and humour, check out @andyuttley’s Off the Grid: Volunteering Time Efficiently where he tells you how he figured out how to best align his skills with making a positive difference in the world.
Finally, on the data science side of things @SydneyF treats us to Reproducibility, Replicability, and Data Science where she extols the virtues of making sure your work is reproducible. FYI Sydney has recently moved over to the Alteryx Data Science team from the Community team which means instead of doing some data science and writing a lot about data science, she’ll be doing a lot of data science and (fingers crossed) writing some about data science.
Culture & Events
*Immerse yourself in data and analytics culture.
New episodes | Alter Everything Podcast
Check, check - is this thing on? September and October were full of unique and fun podcast episodes, and featured a stand-out group of Alteryx Community stars.
Episode 42: Life after Higher Education featured guest host Alex Koszycki (@AlexKo_) is joined by Alteryx Community stars, Mike Fratoni, Matt Desimone (@MattD), and Ozzie Dembowski (@Ozzie). All Drexel University alumni, they shared a chat about their experiences navigating the higher education world, and life afterwards as they carved out their career paths in analytics.
Episode 43: Data science through the eyes of statisticians was in a different format from our regular podcast episodes, where we featured the insights of two statisticians, Victor Veitch and Iain Carmichael and explored the statistical origins of data science and the divisions and approaches to modeling.
Episode 44: Causality Similar to the format in episode 43, @SydneyF guided @MaddieJ through the conversations that Sydney had with two experts in causality, Amit Sharma and Victor Veitch. They had a chat about the basics of causal inference. Be sure to check out the show notes for further learning on this topic!
Episode 45: Interpretability and fairness through the lens of causal inference is the final installment of the causality series, where @SydneyF again walked @MaddieJ through the concepts of Interpretability and Fairness through the lens of Causal Inference. You’ll also hear familiar voices of causality expertise, Dr. Victor Veitch, and Dr. Amit Sharma. Don’t forget to listen to episode 44 first, as this episode builds on concepts learned there.
And if you haven’t yet subscribed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Soundcloud, right here on Community, or your favorite podcast app, there’s no time like the present! Pssst - November is stacked with great episodes that we can’t wait to share with you, including our exclusive interview with Grand Prix winner, @LordNeilLord.
As always, don’t forget to fill out our Alter Everything Podcast audience engagement survey to let us know how we can improve, and for your chance to win some swag!
ACE Highlights
*All about that ACE
Just a few weeks ago at Inspire Europe 2019, Alteryx Chief Customer Officer & Co-Founder, Libby Duane Adams (@LibbyD) welcomed nine new faces to the #ACEfamily.
Major congratulations to @afv2688, @andyuttley, @Ladarthur, @CharlieS, @danilang, @EstherB47, @JosephSerpis, @rafalolbert, and @RolandSchubert!
Although new to the ACE Program, these individuals have been long time contributors to our global community. We kicked off the week at Tobacco Dock with our 2nd annual ACE/DEV Day, where ACEs rubbed elbows with some of Alteryx’s most experienced technical leaders. The day was filled with lightning talks and collaboration on Alteryx design patterns. Thank you to everyone who joined and made it such a success + special shout out to @Hollingsworth for dialing in from North Carolina!
You all make learning and innovating so much fun—-we can’t believe how quickly the day flew by!
The next few days were filled with teaching moments, learning, and of course some much deserved fun with the greater community. New friendships were formed, ideas were exchanged, and history was made. Case in point... this amazing boomerang of some of our 2019 ACEs showing off their new official ACE gear:
from L to R: @ydmuley, @andyuttley, @danilang, @CharlieS, @afv2688, @rafalolbert, and @Ladarthur
Do you or someone you know have what it takes to be in the next 2020 ACE class? Pop over and submit a nomination.
User Group News
*Find Your People, Build Your Network.
Local | German UG Meeting
The German User Group meeting was held 17 October we kicked things off with Tom Becker (@TomB), Sr. Director DACH Sales welcoming the room and quick updates of all things Alteryx in Germany. The DACH Team recently moved into their new office in Munich! Next, Lauren Uyeno (@LaurenU), User Groups Team Lead gave a tour of the Alteryx Community and the goals and benefits to having a local User Group in Germany. The biggest takeaway was a renewed interest in expanding local user groups in Germany to 3 potential physical locations rather than maintaining a virtual national group. We are not stopping there, we still need help from Alteryx Users to help lead and maintain the group! If you are interested in participating on the leadership for a local Germany User Group please send a private message to Lauren.
Thank you to everyone who attended... it’s hard to believe that just 1-year ago the group was founded with 30 participants in a tiny conference room. To stay up to date on the latest German User Group happenings, join the User Group page!
This year in London was the User Groups first year hosting an Industry and Local User Group session, where we had both Industry and Local leaders present. To get the crowd engaged and experience the feel of the Alteryx User Groups, the leaders led a Battle of the Tools game. Participants got to choose between two tools and discuss with each-other the reasons why they prefer one tool over the other. Overall the attendees where excited to learn how User Groups could assist in their journey to learn the Alteryx platform, as well as how to leverage the User Group pages in Community to take the in-person experience to the next level.
That's all folks!
Want more highlights? Check out the Community Highlights blog feed and don’t forget to subscribe to Alter.Nation to stay up-to-date on what's happening in the Alteryx Community!
