BI

I try my best not to hate on Tableau. It was the software’s combination of power and ease-of-use that drove me to purchase a license in the first place. Ever since then, I’m finding new and exciting ways Tableau intentionally locks users out of their data.

I gave the Tableau Server Client Python library a spin recently in hopes of finding something useful. I decided to (sigh, once more) allow Tableau the benefit of the doubt: after pushing four updates in a single month, maybe things had changed. On the contrary, the Tableau business strategy stands strong: to

There's nothing I love more than exposing expensive enterprise software.

It may not seem obvious, but most SaaS products have an underlying core goal: shackle businesses to depend on proprietary, closed-source, costly software. When you pair a surplus of money with a reluctance to work, you've arrived at Corporate America: a prime victim yearning to marry itself to any vendor with a nice pitch deck and a vague promise.

In the case of Tableau, this becomes obvious when you attempt to do anything besides create visuals. I don't like spending hours of my time cleaning data to be rewarded with

Before we get into the specifics of how to sadistically abuse Tableau, let's clear the air: there's something about inaccessible, expensive, proprietary enterprise software that tends to put me in a touchy mood. As we know, B2B software pricing has nothing to do with code quality or even value-add, but rather the tendency of businesses to create time-based urgencies without warning; the kinds of urgencies which may be solved by, say, a tool of sorts.

My first interaction with Tableau actually took place after I had committed myself to the cult of Python's Pandas library and all that comes with

Let's say you're a Data Scientist. Well, maybe not a data scientist- I mean, those online data analysis courses were definitely worth it, and you'd made it this far without being quizzed on Bayesian linear regression. So maybe you're an analyst or something, but whatever:  you use Tableau, So you must be a Scientist™.

I've admitted a few times in the past to have purchased a personal Tableau Server license in my more ignorant years (aka a few months ago). While BI tools are great for understanding preexisting data, they don't allow us to go much further. This is is

Greetings to all my feathered friends upon this fine Memorial Day weekend. Seeing as how you're here, it appears as though we have a lot in common. Namely, we've chosen to spend our three-day weekends on the internet, as opposed to outside.

I've been meaning to build a  widget for this very blog for quite some time now. The vision is to embed a custom Kanban board, which would pull issues from our private JIRA instance to be publicly displayed and formatted to our liking. To my knowledge, nobody has bothered to attempt building something like this yet; probably for