Sunday
After moving furniture and eating burgers, Ken, Jeff, and I went down to the convention center to check in. We thought since we got there pretty early in the registration time we wouldn't have to stand in line for long. We were wrong. We were so wrong that I sent Jeff to Macy's to look at pots and pans (because we still didn't have any).So Ken and I stood in line and talked to someone who works for Pepsi about Tableau and talked to a Tableau employee who was schmoozing the line about the game in the app. We finally got to the front of the line and got our badges and our fancy backpack (seriously, it's a really nice backpack) and water bottle. And then I stood in another line to see if I could get into the 8 hour beginner class on Monday, which was all filled up. As much as I know I would have learned a ton in the class, I was ok with not getting in because I knew I would be able to do a ton of work and school so I could just enjoy Tableau on Tuesday, Wed, and Thursday.
Monday
Tuesday
Breakfast - yummy
Keynote - learned a ton about Tableau and new features
allrecipes.com - learned about how they first established and then built up their BI department and then they showed us a case study from last holiday season when they teamed up with Ghiradelli chocolates and bumped sales up 20% using a marketing campaign that they were able to track using Tableau. Sidenote: did you know that allrecipes.com is one of the top ten social sites on the internet, but no one knows that bc they dont consider it a "social" site.
Drive - a session about how Tableau is learning from their clients. They have taken multiple case studies of how clients have moved Tableau into an enterprise wide tool and created a template for implementing it. A side awesome part of this was that it was led by one of the keynote speakers (the only woman to speak) and I was able to chat with her at Data Night Out later about it. This was also the first time I got a card from someone telling me to email them if I wanted to discuss jobs. I learned very quickly that by just being at something like the Tableau conference moved you from the robots who read resumes to humans who read resumes instantly.
Lunch - really yummy (pretty much at every meal I ran out of plate before I ran out of line)
Scott Simon - the only session besides the keynotes that Ken and I went together. Really interesting to hear him talk about telling stories and how he thinks to tell a good one. I would tell you what they are, but he made us put all our electronics away and just listen.
Ancestry.com - this was my only bust session. They've only been using Tableau for a year and so they didn't have really anything awesome to talk about.
Break time - I quickly went home, dropped off my bag, and immediately headed to the City Center.
Data Night Out - this was insane! I have no idea how much it cost, but they literally roped off the EMP, Space Needle, the Chihuly Glass Garden, and all the space in between. There was food (I figured out after I was full that there was different food in different places), booze (they were pouring them very strong so I only had about 1.5 drinks the entire time), and music (Sir Mix-a-Lot anyone?) everywhere. I spent a lot of the evening with two ladies who work in sales at Tableau but was super stupid and didn't get anything other their last names bc I didnt write them down. I talked to the Ellie, the keynote and Drive lady, about her talks and being a woman at Tableau and told her how much I wanted to work there. I met up with Ken as it was winding down and we wandered around a little together and then left right as everything was breaking up. Also it was interesting talking to people about Seattle who don't live in Seattle.
Wednesday
Breakfast - yummy and I sat with a bunch of people I didnt know. Go me!
Neil deGrasse Tyson - SO GOOD!! He was hilarious and exceptionally talented at talking about really complex concepts at normal people level. My favorite line: "We didn't lose a planet when Pluto was demoted, we gained an entire new area of space" (I will continue to wear my collection of Poor Pluto shirts anyway). His main theme of his talk was about how science is changing all the time and the amount of data we're collecting helps that.
 |
 |
Wired guy - Cliff Kuang works at Wired as a creative director/design writer and his talk was super interesting. His theme - how is our interaction with technology going to continue to change. Super deep and thinking about things I didnt even know to think about. And at the end, I stood up and asked a question.
Zillow - this session was packed. The lady who gave the talk works in the Marketing department side of the BI unit and creates all the graphs and maps and interactions about all the data on their website that they supply to the public on their website. The most interesting thing about this was she said that before Tableau, she made one very rudimentary graph for certain areas, but now with Tableau she's able to create very interesting and interactive maps that not only drives up user numbers but their info gets used in all sorts of things.
Lunch - not as good as the day before. Again, sat with new people.
Michael Lewis keynote - at this point everyone was tired. You could feel it in the audience. I knew that what Michael was saying would have been interesting and engaging any other day, but at that moment in time, all I was doing was trying to keep my eyes open. But I ended up buying The Blind Side and have since read it and found it very interesting. Also funny story: at both keynotes on Wed, Ken and I found each other in the crowd by sheer magic and so were able to sit together.
Agile Tableau - This talk was super interesting. It was all about how the BI department at Intuit (Quickbooks, TurboTax) figured out it was better if they integrated themselves into teams rather than just process requests, so they turned their entire department Agile. I asked about which pieces of Agile they threw out immediately because I always think that's interesting. Also these guys are hiring and I would love to apply to work for them, but they're in San Fran :[
Social Media - this one was half a bust. The first half was a sales pitch for an aggregation system that aggregates a ton of social media into actual info that you can then put into Tableau. But then he showed us what you can do with that data in Tableau and it was super fascinating. Anyone not leveraging their social media, especially in the retail business, is dumb.
Then I went home and went to bed pretty much immediately. By the way, this entire time I was off learning until my head was about to explode, Jeff was at home sitting amongst boxes without internet trying to work with no real food in the house.
Thursday
Breakfast - yummy (they were getting breakfast really right)
John Medina - this guy was awesome. I really wasn't excited about this one, but he got me excited about it in about 30 seconds. He talked about a mile a minute (I could never be a student in one of his classes at UW bc he was literally talking too fast to take notes) and his talk was all about sleep and how we sleep and why sleep is important. I basically learned why Jeff has horrible sleep patterns and how it's effecting every aspect of his life. Lessons learned: take a nap, don't pull all-nighters, and being overtired is just as bad as being drunk (he's got the studies to prove it).
Tableau for the first time - so I took the plunge. I sacrificed two session times for a hands on training session. And boy am I glad I did. Because he showed me tips and tricks at just the beginning level that I never would have figured out myself. I build my first dashboard (which I showed off very proudly to Ken, who was a good sport and smiled and told me I did awesome even though I was doing such basic stuff it was laughable)
Tableau store - Ken and I stopped by the store to pick up some souvenirs. I told Ken I wanted to buy him a shirt as a thank you. But he decided he didnt want a tshirt and so we bought other stuff. I of course got a funky mug and a tshirt.
Hans Rosling - this was the final keynote and he did awesome. This guy owns a non-profit that analyzes data from all over the world and finds patterns. His theme for the talk: how data can show people that what society thinks about the world is actually not true in regard to things like health care and poverty and industrialization. He was also a hilarious old man. Notice in the picture his "analog mouse."
Final Thoughts
This was an amazing experience. I now want to go to many more conferences and continue to learn and grow and meet people. On Monday I was super freaked out. I was crazy nervous and had no idea how I was going to do good networking (which in all honesty was the main reason I was there). And it ended up being so easy. I was just myself and started conversations with people about the food, sessions, and what ever else was on hand to chat about. I ended up with way more cards than I thought was ever possible.
Also Ken warned me that this conference was going to spoil all other conferences and he was right. The venue was awesome, the food really good, the speaker list crazy awesome, and the atmosphere one of excitement, camaraderie, and fun. And the "bar chart" opened at noon everyday.
I have to give a huge mushy thank you to Ken, who not only got me into the conference at literally the last possible second (we found out once we got there that I really shouldn't have been allowed in but Ken's account manager had signed up so many people that the conference people were giving her whatever she wanted), but for seriously taking me under his wing. He introduced me to people, talked me up, and kept calling me his "2nd generation Tableau user." He guided me in the beginning but I was soon running on my own. And I hope he was getting a kick out me being a total newbie (I had the sticker to prove it!) and getting excited about all the little stuff. I couldn't have asked for a better conference guide.
Schedule link: http://tcc14.tableauconference.com/schedule
No comments:
Post a Comment