LIVE from conference room 9... It's Alteryx Thursday!

[kelly_gilbert]

LIVE from conference room 9... It's Alteryx Thursday!
As you may have heard at Inspire, our users get together for an informal, drop-in Weekly Challenge session every Thursday while we eat lunch. This week, @Calliecobbs, selfie-taker and Alteryx Server admin extraordinaire, led us through #151 - Meta Parsing for our weekly practice together. We did this one recently at the Atlanta Alteryx User Group, and it was such a good one (thanks, @TylerWilling)

We enjoyed a nice post-Inspire attendance bump for sure, with at least nine coworkers from six different teams participating in our weekly workout (not all present for the photo, though 🙁)  Thanks to @Calliecobbs @knhinson, @WendyChen, @jwlong91, @calampert (+ 3 more coworkers who are not on Community yet) for joining us! For some, it was their first-ever Weekly Challenge, so I'm looking forward to seeing those shiny new 1 badges tomorrow...

[cplewis90]

@kelly_gilbert This is awesome! Congrats to all of you ( @Calliecobbs, @knhinson, @WendyChen, @jwlong91, @calampert, and 3 others) for getting this started up! I am doing the same things at Whole Foods every Tuesday! You have now given me inspiration to post our sessions on the community as well! Such a great idea! 

[kelly_gilbert]

We just realized that our internal Alteryx Thursday crew is getting very close to a BIG milestone! We're counting down (up?) to our

⭐100th⭐

weekly challenge together! Today was #92... If all goes well, we should make it to 100 on April 30!

Here's where we started, back in February of 2018. After a couple of weeks, we started getting together to work on the challenge during lunch (we called it Alteryx Thursday LIVE!)

It has been amazing to watch my coworkers (and myself!) grow and learn as we work on these challenges each week. My favorite thing is watching a new user jump in and become a "regular" at Alteryx Thursday. Now, some of those former newbies are the leaders confidently walking us through the challenges each week!

[LeahK]

Congrats @kelly_gilbert ! That's actually insane.

I've done 6 weekly challenges myself... and can't imagine EVER getting close to a 100!  Just curious, what challenge was the most fun to solve as group?

[kelly_gilbert]

@LeahK - if I remember correctly, some of the crowd favorites have been:

• #136 - Cleudo! - not too hard for newbies to follow, and it was fun to solve the questions as a group! (@NicoleJohnson: I think this one got the most "That was fun!!" responses of any challenge we have done)
• #202 - Love Poetry - a good opportunity to walk through apps for beginners (also: super fun). About half of our group built their very first app that day!
• #24 - ARIMA Time Series - one of our data scientists stopped by to give us a high-level ARIMA overview and helped us understand how to interpret some of the diagnostics and tool options.
• #153 - And the Oscar goes to... - good for learning reporting tools. Our users got really creative with this one!
• #151 - Meta Parsing - good ol' parsing and reshaping data, good practice for the Designer Core exam. It's also an opportunity to teach macros, since it's pretty easy to convert this workflow into a simple macro.

In general, things that work well in a group:

• Shorter challenges (beginner/intermediate) work well for accommodating a range of skill levels.
  
  
• Challenges that are broken up in to smaller parts (like Cleudo! or #185 - Amplify your Learning...) We'll sometimes take a more involved/more advanced challenge and break it up over two weeks, but feedback from the group is that it feels good to finish in one session (especially if you can't make it two weeks in a row).
  
  
• Challenges that are fairly simple, but focus on a more advanced topic (such as apps, macros, spatial, reporting). They give an opportunity to walk through a new concept together, step by step, and users walk out having built their first app or having used their first spatial tool!
  • #202 - Love Poetry for learning how to build your first app
  • #175 - Tire Size Calculator for learning chained apps
  • #104 - Love's not the only thing in the air for starting out with reporting tools
    
    
• Selecting the challenge on Monday or Tuesday, to let people get a head start before coming to lunch on Thursday. If a few people from our group complete the challenge independently, we can look at the different solutions and talk about why we made different choices. Otherwise, we'll pull up solutions from the Alteryx community, but it's good to have the author in the room to talk about why they chose one method vs. another.

[kelly_gilbert]

We're getting closer... today was #95! We missed one in March due to the suddenly-working-from-home craziness, but we've been back at it by video conference every Thursday!

Today @Korri led us through #207 - Parsing Video Game Data with @jhustin, @jwlong91, @WendyChen, @Kirsten_Aleman, @CallieYuan, (and a few others whose community handles I don't know!) Tons of great regex tips as well as ways to solve it without regex!

I ran into some audio issues, but everyone still got to see my homemade countdown sign 😂 (and also the litter box... oops!)😂