Well it’s time for another round of Community Highlights and Release Notes! This is one of my favorite blogs I’ve ever regularly contributed to a community – and here’s why: there’s a lot of magic that goes on in the background of communities that is rarely if ever talked about. The fact is that many communities put their release notes in a page somewhere and almost no one sees them unless they really look. And we have those page updates, as well. But we get to show off the work that our development team does in detail here and highlight the awesome wizardry that our team does. We’re like a weird Addams Family here on the Alteryx Community Team. You wouldn’t guess it since we’re all over the place geographically and we do a lot of different work and have different hobbies – but for some reason we just mesh and support each other and it allows us to do really incredible things that most communities can’t. So with that somewhat sappy intro (which also gives an excuse for some great GIFs) let’s get into it!
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Need to Know
It's been a busy month for our development team, and we’re excited to say one of our biggest projects has reached completion and is now live. The new and improved Public Gallery on Community is available for users to post and access! During the month of December this area will be in beta, as we’ll be making minor updates and putting the final finishing touches (and addressing any bugs) during this time. You can read more about this new area in our Gallery Blog.
We’ve also made some updates to other areas of the Community. While there’s a lot we’ve done this month, we’re only going to hit on the top two items. If you’re curious about some of the finer details on the release check out our Version History which has more details on all updated areas and behaviors. So first, we’re going to be migrating the Use Cases area off the community and onto its new home on the Alteryx website over the coming months. To help with this transition we’ve removed the Use Case submission button from its main page. However, users can now submit their use cases on the Alteryx website directly. Secondly, we’ve updated the RSVP behavior for events across the community. Now users will be able to RSVP to user group events without necessarily joining the group (that can come after your first user group event!).
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Community News
As we move into December (which sounds ridiculous but is actually happening right now) it’s the season of many different holidays and opportunities for families to come together, friends to show their importance, and to be thankful, merry, and give back whenever we can. While we won’t be outside your grocery store dressed as Santa clanging a bell for your loose change, we do have some great programming that the ACE’s are helping us with – Advent of Code. So go check it out in the General Forums and up that knowledge!
Have you been trying to get Core Certified, maybe as a latent 2020 resolution, but just haven’t made the time or struggled in getting there this year? Well, one of our community members, @rockyw9, decided after jumping headfirst into learning Alteryx that he would put together a resource to help you out! Rocky went from knowing about Alteryx to passing the Core Certification Exam in the span of two short weeks – not only is that timeline fantastic, but Rocky documented all of the resources that worked for him along his journey and put them into an awesome study guide for everyone to benefit from! What’s even better is there’s also a thread that he started in the SparkED area of community for others to share their experience as well. Since everyone has had a different pathway to passing the exam, it’s an excellent place to share your own tips or tricks, resources, and other approaches that may have made it more manageable for you!
And in some other very exciting news – Inspire 2022 is coming and Early Bird Registrations are live! I hope that all of you are excited for the opportunity to get together for an amazing conference in person again. Inspire will be a hybrid event, so if you’re not quite comfortable around the public or traveling yet, there will still be plenty of virtual sessions an d experiences available for you. Check out the new Inspire site and get ready to descend on Denver this spring! And if you have questions and need some help, want to reminisce, or just share your excitement – don’t forget about the Inspire Buzz forum, where you can post to your heart’s content!
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Read and Listen
November on the blog was all about how to. In no particular order... how to moderate Connect comments. How to compare workflows. How to perform feature engineering. How to work with DateTimes. How to predict the effects of holidays on service. How to send a telegram message to your mobile phone. And how to deal with imbalanced data when you’re building a classification model. If you needed more how tos in a single month, you might want to consider sleeping.
But make sure you don’t sleep on the November podcast episodes, as we had guests from Sydney to France, sharing their adventures with Alteryx Machine Learning, and how user groups can motivate your learning journey. We also investigated the future of AutoML systems, and learned from a guest wise beyond her years, about ethics in the world of AI and the IoT.
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Final Thoughts
Like any unit, the community team doesn’t always agree on things (we all tend to be pretty passionate about giving the best that we can to our members) so we advocate, discuss, and eventually come together to make sure that we do things that matter for you. And this month’s release includes some new functionality that we did all of the above, and ultimately brought us together as a team to be stronger than we were before. So check it all out, and know that you by being a community member, you’re basically the extended members of the Addams Family unit that we have going on here- just try to be more like Flora and Fauna and a little less like Debbie Jellinsky.
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