My long Data Viz journey

Hello there, Adolfo here! This is my very first blog post on my very first website Bold Analytics! My main purpose will be to provide you useful and interesting content. On this first post I want to tell you how I ended on Data Visualization.

If you’re part of the Tableau community you probably have seen one of my visualizations either on Twitter or LinkedIn. I’m a 40 years old Mexican guy, Electronic Engineer who has a job as a Compliance Auditor (please don’t make me explain my job!). I discovered Tableau around 3 years ago and I work part time as a Data Visualization freelancer.

I ended up using and loving Tableau after a long, long journey that started with my second job at one of the biggest electronics companies in the world. My main responsibility was to analyze huge amounts of data from service centers across USA, Canada, Mexico and many countries from South America. The data had details about defects on returned TV sets, I had to take all that data, clean it and extract valuable information for our quality, production and R&D areas to improve our products. I had to present all our findings to the top management and lots of questions were asked and findings questioned.

I used to do this with our old beloved friend Excel, lots of line bars, stacked bar charts and yes, pie charts were used (I didn’t know OK!), a full presentation with many slides to unveil the important findings. I loved the analytics part and of course the visualizing part but to be honest I didn’t have any kind of training or knowledge on the subject and looking back I did a lot of things the wrong way!

After 6 years I left the company and started to work at the company I am currently at. My actual job is not related at all on data visualization or analytics on general but has one very big advantage, I manage my schedule, so if I organize my time well I have some spare time! But I didn’t took advantage of this until many years into the job. I got a girlfriend, then got married, then got kids and one day I felt the urgency to learn something new, to do something with my free time, so I decided to start learning programming, a quick Google search directed me to Python and the MOOC movement (it was just starting at the time) and finished 3 courses on Python programming, one was very basic, the second was way more challenging by the MIT and the third was fun, I made a few games in Python (remember Atari’s Asteroids?).

Then for some reason I wanted to learn (re-learn) statistics so I took several courses as well and discovered R, I liked stats a lot and decided to learn a little bit more and took a course on Machine Learning and even entered a Kaggle competition. After that I got interested in Web Design and learnt HTML and CSS. As you can see I was all over the place, that’s one of my main problems I don’t stick to one thing long enough and end up not specializing on anything!

I don’t remember well why or how but I think I discovered Tableau while I was exploring courses on Udemy and found Kirill Eremenko’s Tableau course, I took the course and got hooked up by Tableau and the analytics flow that has. Started using it and doing all the projects on the course and later I discovered the Tableau Community on Twitter and the MakeoverMonday project, started practicing some more and without noticing I realized that I was using the same tool for a long period of time and that’s when I said “This is it, this is what I like!”.

Once I felt that my skills were good enough I decided to start offering my services on a freelancing website, at first I got nothing for a long time, then I got one job then another and now I get projects more often but not enough to quit my current job. That’s my story on how I ended up using Tableau and being a data visualization designer, I’m happy that I found something that I enjoy very much and be part of a great community.

Thanks for reading!

Adolfo