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Engine Works

Under the hood of Alteryx: tips, tricks and how-tos.
QuyenT
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

HackCU, one of the biggest Collegiate Hackathons to exist, hosted their fourth Hackathon on February 24 and 25th at CU Boulder. 600 Hackers. 95 Universities. 24 Hours of Madness. Endless Redbulls and Coffee. An awesome HackCU Organizing Team. What more could you ask for? 

 

Alteryx sponsored HackCU by coming up with an Alteryx Challenge for participants to solve. Of course help came along the way and Alteryx sent technical mentors from our Broomfield office to join in on the madness and help mentor the students who picked the Alteryx Challenge to solve. Students came up to our table and Alteryx tent along the way of the challenge and they contacted us on our Slack channels for hints. We didn't want to give too much away, so we stuck together and only gave out minimal hints at a time to keep them going!

 

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What was the challenge? Our team gave the hackers an unexplained data set. They had to go through a series of different challenges, in Alteryx, to determine a specific event that they will need to tell us the attendance of.

 

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What does this mean?! This is what we gave them. A file that contained a single string consisting of 1s and 0s. They had to convert the string first…

 

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How did our top three teams solve the challenge? Check out each team's process:

 

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1st place shout out to: Jordan, Rahul, Tyler & Adam. This team heavily utilized Alteryx and its plethora of analytical tools to solve the series of challenges. Check out their workflow! 

 

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In 2nd place we want to congratulate: Tyler, Ben and Alejandro! Great job going out of your comfort zone to conquer this challenge. How did they do it? Read here.

 

In 3rd place we have: Priya, Priyanka, Kumar and Sudeep! "We started with converting the binary to string getting a set of JSON requests URLs We fetched these URLs and got returned some values With the extra number provided along with the URL, we returned a single letter from the JSON return, indexed by the number We concatenated these characters (mostly numbers and underscores) to get a list of GPS coordinates separated by underscores."

 

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Congratulations to all winners and participants! We'll see you at the next one!

 

Sincerely, The Alteryx Team.

 

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