Reflecting on Five Years of Blogging

I published my first post on this blog five years ago today (17 Jan 2019) while sitting in a digital nomad workspace in Canggu, Bali. I’d recently completed the 22 month (as it was then) Data School programme and was taking a couple of months out to reflect, catch up with friends and decide what to do next. The break mostly involved eating wonderful food, reviewing what I’d learnt over the prior few years and exploring Canggu on my trusty, albeit slightly scruffy, rented motorbike.

Since then, I’ve published a total of 81 posts (including this one), which makes for an average of 1.3 posts per month for five years, including two guest posts (thanks CJ and Tamás!). A few other stats for those interested:

• Total posts 81
• Total views: 357,000
• Most views in one month: 10,600
• Number of images and GIFs used: 1,000+
• Top three visitor countries: US, India, UK

I haven’t focussed too much on these metrics over the years so it’s been insightful to explore what data is available in the WordPress analytics page. The below metrics on my posting activity were also interesting for me personally:

Aside from 2019, where I had a larger number of shorter posts, the trend has been fewer and shorter posts over the last four years. I think this is partly due to me trying to be more efficient in communicating, which has been a conscious effort, and also on occasion linking out from a shorter post to a related YouTube video that goes into more detail.

Why I’ve been blogging monthly

Maximise the learning process

Ongoing learning is a strong motivator for me and it’s something I would do regardless of whether or not I was writing about it, but the writing process has forced me to dig deeper into topics. For example, I was familiar with a lot of the custom formatting options in Tableau as many are similar to those in Excel and I learned the Tableau specific options as I needed them. But when I ended up writing two blog posts on custom number formatting, it led me to test combinations of options I’d never tried before and really expanded my knowledge of that area of the product. It also provided a reference for me (and hopefully others) to revisit whenever I was working with more complex custom formatting use cases in the future.

Giving back to the community

Tableau has a large and active community. From the Tableau Forums, Tableau Public, User Groups, conferences, community projects and many personal blogs. Much of my learning, since getting started with Tableau in 2017, was supported by those resources so I was keen to contribute back to that pool of knowledge and help others as they learn Tableau.

Promoting new features to the community

Tableau has a regular release cadence, which recently changed from four to three times a year. Each release has many new features and blogging about these – aside from speeding up my own learning – helped share what’s possible with this new functionality and hopefully gave readers an entry point into these new features with some useful examples. These new feature blog posts have made up a significant proportion of the total number of posts on the site.

Build a portfolio and a web presence

As tempting as it was to stay in Bali back in 2019, I knew at some point I would return to the UK and need to find a new role and I was also considering being an independent contractor (which is actually what I ended up doing for most of 2019). Having a website to direct recruiters or potential employers to was helpful in building credibility and enabling them to learn more about my skills and experience. Even if you don’t plan on blogging on a regular basis, I’d recommend setting up a basic website for this purpose alone.

What I’ve learned

There’s always more to learn

The Tableau ecosystem is so broad now, there’s always new areas to explore and write about. While I’ve focussed mostly on Desktop, I’ve also written about Tableau Server, Mapbox (for adding new background maps to Desktop) and more recently integrating Tableau with Salesforce. There’s also Tableau Prep, which I use a fair amount in personal projects but haven’t written about specifically, the various APIs, and much more.

It’s helped me structure my thoughts

My goal in writing these posts is primarily to transfer the knowledge I’ve (usually recently) acquired to the reader as quickly and as clearly as possible. When drafting posts, I’ll often start with a bulleted list – each of which becomes a header – and sub-bullets for the content under each header. This helps create the structure and is easy to juggle around, add or remove bullets etc until the flow makes sense.

Focus on the reader

While I’m not always completely successful in this regard, I try to be considerate to readers who may not be familiar with all the Tableau concepts mentioned in a blog post by giving a quick definition or by linking out to other blog posts or Tableau help articles. When reading a finished post I try to put myself in the shoes of someone who may have stumbled across this post and ask myself “does this make sense as someone seeing this content for the first time? Have I provided complete and clear enough guidance between each step or concept?”.

Show, don’t tell

I’ve always been a visual learner and I find screenshots (captured with Snagit) and GIFs (captured with ScreenToGif) to be a huge shortcut to understanding process steps. I’m always grateful when I see screenshots in other blogs as it’s so much easier than reading “Click the button on the right then select x from the drop down” and then having to scan the screen to find these things.

It might only take a few seconds but an annotated screenshot removes all doubt. It’s also a clear sign that you are (or aren’t!) in the right place. How many times have you found yourself looking for a button described in writing only to find out you were on the wrong screen? This is probably why I’ve uploaded over 1,000 images (mostly annotated screenshots) and GIFs to my WordPress media library!

Why I’m stopping blogging monthly

Given all the positive thoughts about blogging above, why am I talking about stopping? To be clear, I don’t mean stopping blogging here completely; but it will be less frequent and more driven by topic and motivation than by a monthly schedule.

Time for a change

Five years is a long time to be on the same platform sharing information in a similar format month after month, so I’m thinking about alternative formats, platforms and topics that will help keep things interesting for me to continue sharing content in some form.

More data analysis content

I’m still as interested in data visualisation as I was five years ago (more so, in fact) and Tableau is still my tool of choice for exploring and visualising data but that’s only part of the end-to-end data analysis process. There’s also sourcing the data, cleaning it, data modelling, documenting findings and more. While I could share these kinds of posts on datavis.blog, it doesn’t feel like the right platform and it would also be nice to try something new.

Like probably many of you reading this, I’ve used GPT/Bard to ask questions and often found the responses to be excellent, even for Tableau questions, which is a relatively niche topic. For example, as a test I gave Google Bard this prompt:

“provide a summary of what parameter actions are in Tableau and how they work”

Here’s what it came back with (you can right-click and open the image in a new tab if needed):

That’s essentially a blog post response right there! And, of course, it’s interactive. You could ask follow up questions about a specific part of the response, ask for more detail or example use cases etc. What it lacks currently is annotated screenshots but my guess is it’s only a matter of time.

This isn’t so relevant for posts I’ve written about personal projects or more esoteric Tableau experiments, but for more standard content about new or existing features, AI is (or will soon be) arguably an equivalent or even more useful source.

A newsletter for the data analyst 

As a way to try something new, I’m thinking about starting a newsletter for data analysts (and people thinking of entering the field) covering a range of topics across the data analysis life cycle, such as those mentioned above. I’m looking forward to continuing to deepen my knowledge in these broader aspects of data analysis, and sharing what I learn along the way.

When starting this data visualisation blog (which admittedly has been more Tableau focussed than pure data vis to date) I ‘creatively’ came up with the name datavis.blog. Tapping into that same creative flair, when thinking of a name for a newsletter aimed at the data analyst I came up with the name… the data analyst newsletter. I like to think what I might lack in creativity I make up for in consistency .

I can’t guarantee when the first post will be, how frequent they’ll be or exactly what will be in them (can you tell I don’t work in sales?) but if this sounds of interest at all, you can subscribe here. Again, while I’m not sure when the first post will be, I promise there will be at least one post and also that you will, literally, be the first to know when it’s shared!

Finally…

If you’ve ever commented on, shared or most importantly just read – and hopefully found helpful – any of the posts on this site… Thank you!