Non-work related Alteryx uses

Hi Everyone,

I'm curious to hear if you've used Alteryx outside of your usual day-job to take on a fun project or help something in your personal life. I used Alteryx to connect to an API for a video game I play to crunch some numbers on the best items to use. I'm sure some of you out there have some very creative workflows!

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terry10

I analyze my fitness tracking data using Alteryx. 💪

SusanCS

I downloaded my Goodreads data and analyzed it in Designer. 📚I especially wanted to find books that would be more accessible as e-books through the library, but it was pretty fun to also check out trends in my quantity of reading over time, plus correlations between my ratings and books' genre, age, etc.

MaddieJ

@wdavis has done a lot of work with this!

Highly recommend "Will's Weekly Wonders" where he uses Alteryx to help find movie recommendations, and create the ultimate Friday night playlist!

kelly_gilbert

I have way too much fun with Alteryx, and most of the weird things I do become Weekly Challenges 😄

I used mapping and spatial tools to visualize data from a road trip (manually collected and from my OBDII logger) - discussed in this related thread with more great examples from others!
I built an app to help me validate messages for my lighted marquee sign (office decoration), which became Weekly Challenge #250
Our analyst community went to an Atlanta Braves game as part of our annual analyst retreat, and we built a workflow to generate baseball bingo cards (that became Weekly Challenge #191!)
We also did a walking challenge leading up to the last in-person Inspire, and built a tracking dashboard (in Alteryx, of course!) - part of that became Weekly Challenge #166
When our internal Alteryx user group hit the milestone of doing 100 weekly challenges together, we made up our own challenge, which used Alteryx + the Python tool to generate a celebratory gif! (which was inspired by Weekly Challenge #150)

kelly_gilbert

(responding to this post)

@terry10 - what types of analysis do you do with your fitness data?

Joe_Lipski

Awesome question! Here's a few from me:

Tracking and analysing my finances using open banking APIs
Understanding my travel habits (pre-covid)
Analysing my gym activity (pre-covid)
Next on the to-do list - analysing my golf statistics

mceleavey

Good question.

1. Spotify analysis

2. Pricing analysis for trading.

3. Probably shouldn't share this but hey ho:

I had a problem with a product I purchased and the company refused to respond to me requests for a refund. I used Alteryx to scrape the details for the board members of the company. I then automated an email from the server to send them an email on the hour every hour using a FROM email with an incremental number so they couldn't block me.

I ran that for two days until the problem resolved itself.

Don't try that at home, kids.

mceleavey

I did this until it got too depressing.

Joe_Lipski

@mceleavey did you win?

kelly_gilbert

I forgot - two more: 😄

Our internal user group does a weekly challenge together; usually we do the Alteryx-supplied ones, but sometimes the host for that week will create their own challenge. One week, @jwlong91 challenged us to create an app to recommend the best action based on your Yahtzee roll.

He used simulation to develop an extensive probability table for each combination.

I ignored the actual request and just built an app that lets you play Yahtzee (a chained app that dynamically modifies the next app's interface to display the next roll:
Another animated gif to map my virtual Alteryx User Group "travels" in 2020 (99% base Alteryx + Python tool to assemble the final gif):

TheOC

Nothing quite as craft as @mceleavey's solution 😁

But i've used the wordcount and NLP tools for a few surveys i have given out in the past, they were fun to use!

I also built myself a chess opening suggestor based on the Kaggle chess dataset (https://www.kaggle.com/datasnaek/chess) as i wanted to surprise some people at my rank with unconventional openings.

Also earlier this year i started plotting data about myself (steps in a day (understandably not that many nowadays 😁), hours slept, time slept, calories intook, weight etc) and I hope to add additional factors too. I'm interested in having a years data and seeing what conclusions I can make from it (even if it is just, I'm terribly unhealthy haha)!

kelly_gilbert

I'm sorry about the 100 posts, but I forgot one more!

There is a challenge to hike all of the trails in the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area (a series of parks in the Atlanta, GA area), so I have a workflow that compares my AllTrails GPS recording to the NPS trail spatial data to see if I've completed a segment or not.

I try not to do too much non-work stuff with company software/hardware (unless it's related to our internal user group). However, I haven't quite figured my way around the spatial libraries in Python, and Alteryx makes this type of spatial matching soooo easy.

@mceleavey I'd love to hear more specifics on what you did with your Spotify data!

@Joe_Lipski I'd love to hear more details on your gym and travel tracking... What types of metrics did you look at?
@TheOC, make sure to report back once you've collected your quantified self data and had a chance to work with it!

Paul-Evans

Thanks to @ShaanM's "Introduction to Working with APIs in Designer" session this week, I built my first API connection to my budget and transactions in YNAB.

ShaanM

@Paul-Evans this is amazing, glad you found my session useful! There's no better joy than someone curious trying it out themselves and succeeding. Keep going!

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