In about 42 hours I’ll be getting on a plane to Austin, TX for the 2016 Tableau Conference, the highlight of my Tableau year where I get to meet, learn from, and celebrate with 12,000 dataviz geeks and a couple of thousand of their enablers (the lovely and talented Tableau employees who make it all possible). This year will be my fifth Tableau Conference and it hasn’t gotten old, I’m in a new role this year as a consultant and trainer at DataBlick so my focus is a little different. I’m certainly going to learn some more, I’m also networking [plug-alert] hey, did you know that you can hire DataBlick to help you do awesome things with Tableau?[/plug-alert], but most importantly I’m getting the chance to serve the fantastic Tableau community by cheering on some great work, showing off some cool projects and hopefully inspiring others to get involved, and helping other users. Here’s a list of some anticipated highlights of my week:
- All week
- Meeting people, making new friends, finally getting to see friends who I’ve never met in person, talking about my favorite piece of software, and whatever seems important.
- Handing out new business cards! We did a redesign at DataBlick and for our website and business cards we have caricatures of ourselves, here’s my totally Zen’ed out Tableau fanboi pic:
We’re running a contest for whoever can collect all 5 (or 6!) of them, check it out at link. And we’ve got some other swag that I’m really looking forward to handing out, including some presents for the Tableau devs.
- Meeting people, making new friends, finally getting to see friends who I’ve never met in person, talking about my favorite piece of software, and whatever seems important.
- Monday
- Hackathon: One of my #TCMemories from last year’s conference (pic below) was the Web Data Connector Hackathon, seeing dozens of customer developers building out new connectors was fantastic, I’m excited to see even more development that builds out the Tableau ecosystem.
- Data+Women Meetup: I’m really happy to support the fantastic work and community-building that has been happening with the Data+Women effort.
- MakeoverMonday: This runs concurrently with Data+Women so I won’t be there. 🙁 What the Andy’s (Cotgreave and Kriebel) started and what the community has collectively created is amazing! Did you know they just won an InformationIsBeautiful award?
- Hackathon: One of my #TCMemories from last year’s conference (pic below) was the Web Data Connector Hackathon, seeing dozens of customer developers building out new connectors was fantastic, I’m excited to see even more development that builds out the Tableau ecosystem.
- Tuesday
- Healthcare & Life Sciences Meetup. Andy Dé who leads Tableau’s work in healthcare will be facilitating this, I’m looking forward to meeting other healthcare users there. And as I’m one of the leaders of the Tableau Healthcare User Group I’ll be networking to find speakers for our next meetings!
- Keynote – Tableau Vision. Like it or not Tableau will be having some amount of a culture shift with the new CEO, I’m looking forward to seeing what they say in public and reading the tea leaves.
- Tableau Labs (they run all week). I used to work in software development and I love that Tableau gives us the opportunity as users to talk directly with the devs about what’s coming, what we like, and what we need.
- Data-Driven Alerts Come to Tableau. As one of the developers of VizAlerts I applaud Tableau for continuing to build out native alerting functionality and I’m looking forward to Zac Woodall’s presentation.
- Supporting Eradicating Malaria in Zambia by 2020. I’ve been a volunteer on the #visualizenomalaria project with the Ministry of Health in Zambia, PATH, and the Tableau Foundation and it’s really inspiring. In fact some of the code I’ve contributed to VizAlerts has been to meet requirements for Zambia. Jeff Bernson, Anya A’Hearn, Allan Walker, and I will be sharing our stories and pointing out ways that you can get involved in this or other projects.
- Devs on Stage. As much as I can point out the flaws in Tableau the developers know them better than me because they are living in that, and there are many fantastic things too. This is the devs moment to shine and a chance for me to cheer them on and appreciate them for what they’ve built that has changed my life, I’ll be down in front and making a lot of noise.
- Elections! Besides the general elections the *really* important election for me is at my daughter’s awesome school where she (at the age of 9!) is running for school president, they’ve done a whole election theme where she’s had to write and give speeches, produce media, participate in debates, get interviewed, etc. (Yes, I’m a proud papa). If you see me staring at my phone Tuesday afternoon it’s because I’m updating my Facebook feed for the election results.
- Wednesday
- Healthcare User Group. I’m facilitating this lunchtime group where we’ll have another meetup and Nicole Webb and Marina Chakhalyan of Adventist Health will be presenting a great story on a workforce dashboard. I’m told that this user group will fill up, so get there early!
- Jedi Chart Types. Chris DeMartini and Adam McCann are going to describe how they build their stunningly beautiful network graphs.
- VizAlerts: KPI-Based Alerting, Burst Emails, and More for Tableau. Matt Coles and I will be presenting VizAlerts 2.0 and a whole series of demos of use cases for VizAlerts and where it’s applicable (or not). We’ve also got a special audience-interactive demo (and contest!) planned.
- Use Tableau Like a Sith. Unfortunately this is scheduled at the same time as my VizAlerts session so I can’t be there but I’ll be there in spirit. Plus DataBlick has something special in store for the Sith-lords in training.
- Data Night Out. I have so many great memories of making new friends here and catching up with old ones, it’s always a highlight. Here’s a shot of a few thousand folks at #data15, plus a few crazy ones heading out on an aerial tour of the party:
- Thursday
- Zens in the Community. I’ll be in the Tableau Community area for an hour to meet whoever shows up, I love to hear what people are doing and encourage them to get more involved.
- Tableau Zen Doctor. One of the responsibilities of being a Tableau Zen Master is that we spend some time in Tableau Doctor helping users, for me helping other users on the Tableau forums, over email, over screenshares, and with HelpMeDataBlick has taught me so much that I’m grateful for the opportunity to do that in person.
- Bill Nye. The USA only seems to have room for a couple of public scientists at a time, I’m thankful we got to see Neil deGrass Tyson (twice!) and now Bill Nye.
And there’s all the ones that I won’t get to see in person but will be watching on video afterwards, sessions by Doug Grindel and Alan Eldridge and Bethany Lyons and Jock MacKinlay and Maureen Stone and Craig Bloodworth and Jewel Loree and Michael Kovner and Amanda Pype and Mark Jackson and Matt Francis and Heidi Lam and Andy Kriebel and Melanie Tory and Jeffrey Shaffer and so many more…it’s going to be a great week.
If you want to connect with me during the week, look for me on Twitter @jonathandrummey. Also Keith Helfrich and Chris DeMartini have put together a time-suck of a #data16 Twitter network analysis viz at rhsd.io/tc16-network-viz, it’s totally fascinating! Tweet #data16net to let them know you are looking at it!
See you there!