Alter.Nation
Community news, customer stories, and more!
Hi All!
Back in May this year, I attended my first ever Alteryx Inspire. I had absolutely no idea what to expect, and I went into it very blind, especially with being already apprehensive about travelling to the States for the first time. In light of this, I'd love to take you through three of my favourite elements of Inspire and give you a small taste of what the event has to offer.
The Community Is Far Larger & More Personal Than I Ever Imagined.
The first day of the event absolutely blew me away. It was far from low-key, and on day 1, I arrived at this:
A room full of thousands of people, all as much nerds in the Alteryx world as I am. Trust me, it's a great feeling being in a place where everyone is as interested in talking about Alteryx as you are, including discussing ideas and problems they have been facing. This led to an amazing resource in having a collective hive mind of experts throwing ideas into the mix to help - it was a fantastic experience that I was able to learn so much from.
I was also able to meet up with a few of the superheroes of the Alteryx Community, including some of the Alteryx Aces - who are fantastically approachable and friendly by the way! I had to get a photo for proof:
From left to right:
Me (yes, I do go outside), @mceleavey, @Ladarthure, @MarqueeCrew (with the awesome Alteryx license plates), @Jean-Balteryx, @T_Willins, @grossal
It didn't take much chatting with members of the Community and Alteryx Aces before I was taking notes on my phone for projects, blog, and macro ideas.
Alteryx Products Are Developing Thick And Fast
One element I loved about Alteryx Inspire is the ability to have sneak peeks and even fully-fledged demonstrations of the new products in the pipeline. This included many of the future features being developed for Alteryx Designer Cloud, Auto-Insights, and Alteryx Machine Learning. For me, this was incredibly useful to be able to understand where Alteryx is moving to and where my organisation and I should start thinking about putting focus into now to best position ourselves for the future... also, as a nerd, it was incredible. I cannot wait to get my hands on some of these new tools and start unlocking even more from my data.
I am also rightly or wrongly very sceptical of anything new. Alteryx had my back on this one too, with a live environment within the conference, where you can have a one-to-one session with an instructor and be led through the new tools. This quickly soothed my scepticism and solidified my seat on the #CloudBandwagon.
Source: GIPHY
The Level Of Teaching And Presentation Is Amazing
The event and sessions were fantastically well put together, and despite considering myself as closing in on the Expert exam, I was able to learn so much. If you don't know, Alteryx Inspire features main-stage sessions held by Alteryx that cover the direction of products and very interesting discussions. We then have any number of breakout sessions we can sign up for and attend held by Alteryx employees, ACEs, and users.
I managed to attend a few of these breakout sessions - and the value received was worth the trip alone. I learned about Designer Cloud, how Alteryx was being used in specific organisations, and the ways we can level up our workflows. The main thing I enjoyed about these sessions is they typically had a great range of knowledge being shared - something for those new to Alteryx and also those advanced.
I am actually lucky enough to be attending Alteryx Inspire EMEA next week; I hope to see a lot of you there! I am also hopeful to be able to attend future Alteryx Events too--they're seemingly always a blast!
