randypitcherii's comments

I'm a heavy user of the Snowflake data warehouse and was surprised to see no one was discussing today's announcements on HN. Some big stuff was announced today!

A quick fix I found for this is to use a text-to-speech plugin for chrome (any text to speech service is fine).

I'm a huge podcast and audiobook fan and found that I couldn't stop skimming when trying to read online. This approach helps me to actually stick to reading the words on the screen without distraction.

By hearing AND reading, I find I'm able to retain the information better and I break the cycle of constantly rereading the first sentence of a large paragraph.

A large part of my job involves creating data visualizations to summarize work to non-technical audiences.

I found Udacity's course on data visualizations to be a great resource for nailing the basic rules of effective data visualization and communication.

Something I've learned as I've worked is to have some way to quickly try ideas and some way to productionize the insights you've found for broad consumption. So I really like using pyplot or tableau for really fast insight gathering and visualization creation. Once I've got what I think are good visualizations, I can then decide what makes the most sense for production. Sometimes this means a custom D3 web solution, other times a tableau dashboard is just fine; it all depends on the project.

And separate from all this, make sure you frequently include fresh sets of eyes for your visualizations. It's easy to make something that is obvious and useful to you, but is hard to understand for others.

Good luck consulting. I don't have much help in getting that started. I am really passionate about this field so it's always great to hear about others who enjoy visualizations as well!