Ryan Robitaille

You never know what awesome stuff you’re going to find… While I was browsing the web yesterday evening, I landed upon a article explaining how ‘Starting Pages’ are out-of-fashion and now everyone wants a ‘Data Dashboard’. Which, intrigued me – since dashboards and operational analytics are a big part of what I do for a […]

We, over here at Linium, love Tableau Server. Big time. It takes quite the tool to be able to wrap around all my procedural data hacking and make it look like it came that way. Custom internal apps + Salesforce data + consultant time-tracking data + Quickbooks data etc – it all fits, works, comes […]

A fun little Viz I did about Bigfoot sightings.

Basically, I harvested all the sighting info off of The Bigfoot Field Research Organization site with Python and the Scrapemark module – inserted it into a local SQL Server database – cleaned it up and threw up a pretty looking Viz using Tableau Public.

Visualizing Squatch of the Nation!

I’m pretty happy with it – its quite interactive and hopefully someone finds it fun or interesting.

Twitter. It’s everywhere. It’s Data. Realtime, Social, Contextual Data. But, if you want to do any real trending, data mining, post-processing, or even simple analysis on it – you really need to be making a historical record of what you’re looking for and store it in a usable way. I will show you how to create SQL Server tables and use a simple Python script to pull out tweets and save them for future analysis.

As I’ve been very vocal about all over Twitter and elsewhere – I’ve been spending a lot of time playing with Tableau Public over the past few weeks. Lots of learning, experimentation, tweaking, and some full blown data / analysis presentations have occurred. During that time I learned a lot about the way the product works and continue to try and “jazz” up my Tableau “vizes” in any way I can. Here are a couple of trick that you might find as useful as I did.

It’s interesting, the types of data conversations you have with people when discussing a unique project like MetallicAnalysis. You’re trying to show things in a different way and get as deep as possible, BUT never want to get too lame or “tech-y”, else it loses contact with the actual subject matter and begins to make less sense. Numbers are cool, but numbers that ACTUALLY FUCKING MEAN SOMETHING to the average fan / person are way cooler…

I’ve been messing around with Tableau Public for a few nights, and I must say that it is damned impressive, and I’ve used a LOT of Reporting / Analysis / Business Intelligence tools in my day.

I needed to do a proper test / POC; the question was – what kind of data do I use to give it a proper test drive?

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a huge Metallica fan, hell for as long as I can remember, that’s just been “one of my things” (as many current, ex-girlfriends, and ex-wives can attest to)…

Let’s be honest – I’m a data guy. “Geek” to be more exact. But, I’m also a sports guy – and if there is ANY sport out there that prides itself as being massively data-centric… its Baseball. Data goes with baseball like Barry Bonds and… um, Home Runs (yeah, that’s it). Data collecting is an […]

Just a recent article I wrote for the C&C Computer Solutions site / blog. Great stuff. Here’s a bit of the intro, but for the MEAT of it, you’ll have to go to the C&C site and read it yourself…