Alter.Nation
Community news, customer stories, and more!
Today’s ACE spotlight is @alexnajm! Keep reading to learn more about Alex and what makes him a unique Alteryx super user.
Tell us a bit about your professional background.
I grew up in the restaurant business as my family owns Lebanese restaurants in the DC Metro area. After graduate school, I worked at Marriott as a Data Analyst—this is where I first picked up Alteryx.
I became the super user there at Marriott, but COVID hit the hospitality industry hard, and I was furloughed. Because I wasn't allowed to work, I upskilled further in Alteryx, became Advanced Certified, and the Alteryx rep for Marriott Cory Lermo suggested I check out Aimpoint Digital which was rapidly growing in the Alteryx space. I haven't looked back since!
What is your favorite Alteryx tool, and why?
That's a tough one - I am partial to the Spatial tools because I love traveling and I thought these tools were the coolest things when I first started using them. Icon-wise though, the Control Parameter is definitely my favorite because of the recycling icon in the middle!
What has been your favorite Alteryx project? Can you tell us about the business problem you solved?
My favorite project was mapping out all the Marriott hotels worldwide and then overlapping them with their time zone polygons to offset certain metrics to that hotel's local time.
We had check-in and check-out times in a standard UTC time format, but it was not useful because it wasn't in local time, and there wasn't a way to easily link the hotel to a time zone. But what we did have for every hotel worldwide was their latitude and longitude values. We converted those into spatial points in Alteryx. We then grabbed a time zone map from a government database, and we were able to map each hotel to the correct time zone to calculate the local time.
For one hotel, there are hundreds of check-ins/check-outs per day—and with 7,000+ hotels at that time, you can imagine how big that dataset was as well.
What advice do you have for new community members?
Be curious! Search around for questions, ask questions, and keep learning - as someone who just started out doing Interactive Lessons to now teaching Alteryx full time, I can tell you firsthand that you just need to keep up that curiosity!
Zion National Park before Inspire 2023
What is your favorite way to engage as an ACE? Also, what area of the online community do you spend the most time in?
Talking about my journey as just a business graduate coming out of school to now being an ACE! I probably spend the most time in the Discussions (when I do not need to recertify 😊).
What discussion topic(s) could Community members tag you in for help?
Anything non-coding, although I would definitely prefer Spatial problems!
What is one fun thing about you that community members might not know?
I have a lifelong goal of visiting every country in the world - I try to average 4 new countries per year. I have been to 47 so far... and counting!
When I was studying in school, I studied abroad in Spain, China, France, England and Italy. Besides Lebanon being my second home, one of my favorite countries I’ve been to is Singapore—it was really impressive! I love Singapore, and even though it's small, it has great food and a diverse culture. It’s also very clean and super modern.
