Limits. Austin City Limits is the music festival here. There are limits on the mathematic functions we write at times. There are capacity limits to venues, transmission lines, to batteries and capacitors. There are limits to how much one person can eat and drink in a 12 hour period, to how functional one can be off of 6 hours of incredibly interrupted sleep.
Limits are like rules.
They’re made to be broken.
Tableau Conference 2016 (#data16) was about breaking limits. Tableau is a data visualisation (viz) software whose purpose is to show us the data in a way that we can understand quickly, easily, and intuitively. And for those of us who do that, we ride the beginner and intermediate path.
What I learned at this conference is that, in practice, the colour-in-the-lines approach is probably all my clients are going to want and need. But I have a mastery of that beyond what I thought. As I suffered through intermediate classes, I realised that I had more in me.
Much of the conference isn’t really about the limited view of Tableau. The advanced sessions teach you the nuance of the Tableau engine and how it works. But the Jedi sessions: Those are where the limits are shattered.
From building out vizzes that act as video games to hacking data sources by making copies of PostGresQL databases, I saw a dazzling array of limitless vizzing.
I was inspired by what is possible if you just take off the reins.
And of course, any comic book will tell you that there is a direct correlative factor between responsibility and power (that would be a nice scatterplot…). But #data16 is about unleashing that power and giving in to the calling within.
This week didn’t go as I had expected. I slept a lot less than I thought I would. I ate a lot. But #data16 taught me more of those core concepts and cemented in me why one would use a table calculation versus a filter. It also taught me that the reason I love vizzing is because it takes a mindset that looks at problem solving in a different way. The Tableau community, all these people from all over the world applying vizzing to pharmaceuticals or banking, is a resource to be tapped, a wealth of inspiration, and a damned fine group of people.
The chaos of having 13,000 people was palpable. I was shut out of two of the four keynotes due to capacity limits (and one advanced dashboarding session). But despite those limitations of physical space, the limitations we have while vizzing are not as clear cut. It takes time, brainpower, and importantly data.
Nevertheless, I hope to ride this high for a while and take more passes at #MakeoverMondays or peruse Tableau Public. Because although my clients won’t necessarily want the shiniest, most brilliant viz, the elements that are brought together to create one are definitely skills that people want to have on their team.
I’ll probably have more to say as I continue to (literally and figuratively) digest this week. But until then, happy inspirations.
