Paul Murdaugh, power and money. I’m learning is able to get away with murder because he has rich parents. ABC is showing a show called “House of Murdaugh” and not that I’m able to keep up with everything, what I’ve gained is these kids are richer than rich.
House of Murdaugh is a good explanation of what money and power can do in the obstruction of justice. If you can afford keeping your kid out of trouble, I’m sure you would, however if they are the reason for someone’s death, would you protect them?
That’s the tough problem with these situations, you have the power, the money, and the ability. 8 days after the missing body was found, you wonder, is justice going to happen? The family of this child knows it will be a coverup.
Eva Pilgrim, walks you through the story, and they paint the picture that Paul has denied driving the boat – although eye witnesses have explained he was driving. Video interviews show these things but yet here’s this show. They have family members of Murdaugh on this show saying they are not above the law and not all powerful. Really an interesting thing this show, white kids get all this air time and charges appear to never be applied, and after 2 months it finally landed.
25 years in prison, boating under the influence, and orange jump suit incoming right? Paul was released, not treated like a criminal, and June 7, 2021, Alex Murdaugh calls 911. I’m writing while I watch, this is nuts. House keeper got killed too? Oh shit. You might want to watch this too. Now the kids dad has his wife and son killed.
Next, they start to go into detail about Steven.
SLED re opens an investigation, 19 year old kid, dead in middle of road, … Connected to this murder. An openly gay kid dead in the road. Pathologist determines it’s a hit and run, although there’s no evidence of being hit by a car. They connect shoes on feet to not being possible for a hit and run.
Sandy Smith, hears people directly tell her who it is, the Murdaugh boys. Buster Murdaugh killed their kid. Also, was never charged. Untimely deaths do appear to be the calling card.
Alright back to this crazy show. Yall enjoy your day. Add me on twitter.
The internet is funny, the world is built on algorithms, these algorithms learn you and feed you content. Have you ever built content, after spending a long time on this content, and gain no response or impressions?
Chances are that content isn’t optimized to rank or against competitors who are willing to beat you in ranking for traffic.
That’s the sad world. A lot of people are getting the attention you desire because they are willing to learn SEO more than you. Also, people are willing to cheat.
Cheating rules the web. Social media. Thought leadership. A lot of it is hacked, faked, and not existent.
Look at instagram, check out technology related keywords, and tell me how much high fashion you see. How much is related to the keyword?
Often, during peak hours, it’s heavily populated with non-tech content. It’s sad because they are targeting men in most cases because sex sells and they push sexually explicit content into these funnels too.
That’s the issue, there’s really no transparency into their bot accounts, bot networks, or paid ‘likes’ and paid ‘follows’…
You can hide all of these things, it’s not something they will ban because it consumes advertising spend, each bot consumes their client advertising revenue, and bingo the internet is born.
So if you need impressions, ask someone directly to like the content, chances are most people will miss the content, and you’re in need of more visibility. If you chat with people about your posts, the algorithm will also show them your posts.
If you’re not blogging yet, check out medium, blogger, and weebly for free websites to blog on and be sure to blog about your content on these mainstream websites. The more you blog the more traffic your entire website will gain.
A year ago my wife and I were happily posting content online and then a few events happened.
There’s a large phase where I was posting pictures of my family and regularly updating everyone. I’m a new dad. I’m trying to also be a responsible parent and not over share my children online. However more than anything I’m proud and that was why I shared content about my family online.
There was a time where my wife and I talked a lot about sharing content online. Mostly it was me talking about the negative side effects I’m facing due to being on social media. I wrote about taking 30 days off of facebook, and since then I’ve made Facebook work for me.
Image from @felicity-tai on pexels, women siting and writing on chair
Back in the day sharing content online felt like the right thing to do, however after two significant life events, I don’t feel sharing things online is as important as I thought.
Sharing content online is important. It helps many with feeling connected in this new realm of tech capability. We are using features generated in code that help us connect and often we don’t think of negative side effects until something happens.
I will share one event in particular. My wives dog was pulled through a fence and bottom jaw broke. My wife and son saw everything. Every minute of this day plays in my head a little differently each day. PTSD from this event has rattled through our home and now feels as if it’s leaving in a similar fashion. Although once you research PTSD, you learn it never really leaves, and it’s always here. This event taught me a lot about how I’m feeling about other life events. It taught me that there’s hope for the way I’m thinking and there’s people who are getting help. The thought that people can seek help was worth a lot. Understanding there’s an algorithm to success beyond life events made things feel right.
My son does not wake up randomly scared or upset. Always telling me his dreams are frightening. He is not having dreams about the event. I know because I ask. He’s very smart and good about communicating what’s happening around him and explains how he feels. I thank my wife for making this possible by researching what’s good and bad for children.
image by @rodnae-prod on pexels, a person writing on paper, sitting down
I also am able to get to bed a little earlier than usual. Staying up late and letting negative things impact you will eventually result in losing so much sleep that a lot starts to happen. I’ve always had trouble getting to bed in a decent amount of time and this event has generated another layer to the problem.
I learned staying up late is a great way to really sit in your feelings. Also gaming at night has always been my preference. However with children you don’t get a chance to sleep in and that means you have to find a balance. My new balance is “just go to bed.”
If you have feelings and you want to face them, staying up late to face them really does appear to be a viable option. Also, getting rest regularly will benefit you too. I don’t want to tell people to avoid the darkness that is their brain on lack of sleep. A lot comes from this gray area of life and I’ve meditated on it long enough. Now, I’m at a point where I realize if I don’t get rest then I’m not moving at the same tempo.
Writing as much as I am right now is to help me get back into doing something that helped me escape needing a full time job. That’s important to me because I need to be more available to my family.
The horrible accident that happened to my wives dog Charlie really reshaped the way I think about making content and for awhile I had a lot of trouble writing anything that felt worth sharing. Even now I feel my content falls into a dark and painful writing style that I don’t always agree with and my draft content is massive and fueled with something I’m not able to explain yet.
Charlies accident didn’t bother me as much as seeing it get to my family in the moment got to me. That’s the thing that has lasted the longest. Seeing it get to them and seeing it get to them after the fact. This stopped me from wanting to write anything or create anything.
I had trouble going to meetings, was never sure what was going to happen anymore in my home, and covid19 hasn’t exactly made things easy.
I’ve since been able to get back into meetings and even work new client engagements.
During that time it was interesting, we had client engagement, who went ghost after working us for weeks, plus constantly scheduling meetings and never showing up, then excusing the fact that they are unable to show up, and now believes they owe us zero dollars. This engagement really helped us understand that there’s a certain kind of client we are after and clients who believe they can work us per hour and not pay any money for that time are not the ideal people to work with as “clients.”
I’ve learned you can expense these clients, and also take them to small claims court. However you can also get sued and that can cost more than the engagement. With that said, be mindful freelancing and living your life. Life events happen, often it can impact us and our ability to continue doing what we love doing. It’s cool to get back on the horse, and fail, plus it’s cool to keep trying.
This is me trying. My goal is to really keep after writing, even if it’s not that great, and continue sharing what I want to share in the moment.
While writing SQL in bigquery I was thinking about how this task comes with a cost. First, it takes a lot to do all of this tech. Second, it takes a lot of patience to get bigquery to work. We are trying to re-write tableau calculations in SQL because we have found that the prototyping stage is done and we need to deal with a specific set of lag time.
Here’s some bigquery sql that we have been slowly understanding in our local environments.
DATE_TRUNC(DateT, month)<=DATE_ADD(DATE_TRUNC(LastDate, month), INTERVAL 0 month), in this you also need to be able to figure out how to get the LastDate, this means you’re finding the SELECT MAX(DateT) FROM TableA. Whether you’re one to do this in a subquery or as a temp table in your header code, this code can go somewhere, for now in your mind. The reason for this is because I’m finding trend data is starting to be less relevant for this augmentation of Tableau. This allows us to remove all the dates and bucket everything into periods of time. When periods of time fluctuate it’s possible to only deal with the input data, however you need to know SQL to get there don’t you?
I started learning SQL while I was in college at University of North Texas, while learning SQL I was also working 3 fast food jobs, and that’s the axe I needed to sharpen to be able to say I”m writing SQL for money, and using my personal LLC to bill and invoice clients. It’s cool to have ten years under your belt since college. It’s also a cool time for finding jobs that require a decade of experience. That would be an interesting role. It’s what I offer now publicly to any company or government agency. Getting to this point takes time.
I like Bigquery for the fact that it’s not that bad after you get past the UX of getting here. I could write a blog about that one day but this isn’t a high priority because no one is asking for a bigquery tutorial. Maybe this will be a good future thing to discuss.
Bigquery allows for non-technical people to do things that are rather deep in the SQL realm of things and you can do this by simply being patient and googling a bit more than you might desire. A few more stack overflows than you may desire will be needed to grow. But when is that any different from other technologies. Just know people are not incentivized to keep those posts up-to-date.
Tasks are things to be completed and often if you’re trying to do a task more than once it needs to be automated.
Parent child relationships are not always present. Often we are left to come up with these solutions in life by best guessing. Then there’s the time where you grab someone 3x better than you to challenge the entire solution.
A literal cost. Also, you start to look at your skills for gaps, and even worse you consider yourself wrong most of the time you’re doing everything.
Most don’t speak of the cloud in a negative light. Not the cloud data adopters.
The cloud is an expensive place to run applications and only big companies can utilize these tools.
To be able to afford a cloud compute means you’re doing good financially.
Cloud computing[1] is the on-demand availability of computersystem resources, especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user.[2] Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each location being a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale, typically using a “pay-as-you-go” model which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for unaware users.[3]
Cloud computing is cool. Also, cloud storage is expensive too.
Cloud storage is a model of computer data storage in which the digital data is stored in logical pools, said to be on “the cloud“. The physical storage spans multiple servers (sometimes in multiple locations), and the physical environment is typically owned and managed by a hosting company. These cloud storage providers are responsible for keeping the data available and accessible, and the physical environment secured, protected, and running. People and organizations buy or lease storage capacity from the providers to store user, organization, or application data.
As you start writing SQL and build sophisticated transactions, you start to learn to write good and bad SQL.
In big data, the mistakes cost money. There’s more thought in big data. You don’t want to query a lot of data unnecessarily.
I enjoy work. Work is fun. Data is a fun puzzle.
Starting my tableau consulting services company helped me put my resume in front of people and often I get a chance to help with big data solutions.
The past few days has been focused on optimizing the SQL we wrote last year. The more you get into this big data world, the more you think before you run your query.
Now that I have 10 years of experience of data under my belt it’s fun to look at big data projects for “how we can write this better.”
When data is small and not 30 to 200gigs each run, life is easier, and when it’s huge… you have to pause and think. Otherwise you’re literally blasting your cash down the data pipeline.
Well if this blog sucks, you can jump over to my twitter where I just posted all the #bitcoincrash meme’s and videos created by the adopters.
There’s more to life than true or false conditions. It’s the tableau guru in me who thinks too boolean about most objects. Also, the title felt like a fun title. Found a cool picture by @didsss on pexels to help with the story.
I was hoping to move faster than I was able to move today and felt really as if I was unable to stay patient. I blame the 2x caffeine coffee and incredible high kick exercises. I drank a lot of coffee today and ate correctly.
I need to focus on the foundation before rushing ahead. Similar with exercise. This is a message I need to learn to sell to clients, myself, and I know this comes with experience. Sprinting is fun.
I want to mention, I’m very lucky to have the support of my friend and mentor Dave right now.
Dave is helping me big time. Right now Dave is able to to focus for more hours than I can focus. Dave has children and so do I. Dave has children older than my children and is available to help in a way that I can not help. It’s a great fit. He is telling me about what’s important and helping me avoid making mistakes he made.
I’m really fortunate to have good mentors and friends.
Having a back up plan to solve problems as they arise is important. Like thinking Tableau public will query Google sheets without a problem and then finding there’s a problem without a good reason. You dig in only to find you’re the expert and others are talking.
Rushing is causing outages. Technical debt is generated while rushing. We specialize in evolving our development to ensure it’s working and able to scale. Since the new year I’ve been focused on ensuring products we built in 2021 are working in 2022. This often means I’m having to consider the black or white truths that live behind decisions in XML.
XML being the blood of my clicks in Tableau desktop.
Today I spent most of my day explaining technology that I’ve engineered to a better engineer. The reason is because dev3lop.com clients deserve success with our time and materials engagements.
I find it’s easy for my brain to generate buckets to help classify or group information. Often this leads me to over generalizing and fundamentally changing the way others think about the information.
I like to boil the ocean for parent categories and bucket beneath. Black and white has meaning to data stewards and often how they work together is a pattern to think about and consider.
Transitioning a great client engagement into a new opportunity for another person is my focus the past few years.
It has been a lot of work doing it with organic traffic, however it worked and I’m scaling up my tableau consulting services funnel.
I think back to the days where I’m having to spend at least a few thousands to make google ads work…
Those are good memories, I feel a little black or white about that learning path, and I remember the pain.
Pain in life is normal. How we react to the pain is important.
I’m working through pain myself. Lots of toxic work environments pile up on you.
I realize more and more each day that I’m in a lot of pain from working too much on a computer.
Over the next few months I’m going to be finding health professionals who want to talk through ergonomic injuries. It would be nice to share that with other developers.
I believe that will be good information that appears most people hide in technology. I know it’s hard to talk pain or disabilities because a lot of us have tried going into jobs or opps being honest about our pain and not seen any success.
Feeling both good and bad about your history as an entrepreneur.
Feeling both good and negative feelings about your history feels like a normal day of an entrepreneur. Having fun hobbies that help you get out of this mental space is important. Music creation in form of improv I’ve found to be most therapeutic and also meditation.
Let me just think of a time where I was uncomfortable about being an entrepreneur and didn’t feel like accepting the status quo.
Before trying google ads, I was always wondering how it worked, and after doing it you learn a lesson.
You learn you lose out on a large amount of money by marketing to get the lead in the first place.
You learn google has no incentive from keeping your competitors from clicking your click ads.
Google has no incentive to build good user experience if it means they earn more money.
A lot of things are built to generate these uncomfortable feelings. Not on purpose, but if you notice you lost money, would you return to the path that made it more difficult for most but made you more money? That’s web2.
I’ve noticed most things “algorithm” based have a way of making you feel uncomfortable.
Before a few years ago I did not know I was a visual learner.
Because I’m weird… I would write “faster than fuck” trying to keep up with a speaker.
Trying to keep up with words people say is exhausting. At a row level, it feels like I’m dealing with acid compliance at a row level, I’m a beep boop robot.
Now I know better. I’m very visual.
I can draw pictures with words, ask questions, make diagrams, and eventually start to generate something that is sensible.
I’m very visual and after notes are generated, next step are appearing or completely obvious at this point.
I like learning patterns. My grand mother showed my patterns in checkers and chess growing up. I also noticed a pattern that she was declining mentally while playing these games with her. That was an interesting aspect of life.
Chess is a very visual game. You get to see all the chances, the moves, and your options are obvious. The other team is trying to make their moves not obvious by getting you distracted with other moves that seem more important. Hiding your moves is important.
Hiding what you mean behind your words is a place to add visual documentation
Visual documentation takes your understanding to another level, it’s the architecture, it’s the blimp view, it’s more than a few buzz words and spoken phrases that mean XYZzzz.
Before understanding what a visual learner is I was alway trying to fall into a pattern of what I was trained to do…
Photo by Anna Shvets on pexels of lady writing notes while others on video conference are talking.
Being trained is cool if the person training you knows what they are doing.
I talk about this topic too often, however it’s something that I see often. A lot of trainers are career trainers and have little to no experience in production experience of this application or software or code. I try to avoid learning from them, unlike people like Brian Holt. Brian has a lot of experience and also enjoys training others. This is really rare.
Before I understood I enjoy whiteboarding and living the consultant life… I was trying to write notes like people expected notes to be built in high school or pre high school, which is row level information each time.
I would enter information into this line until it’s full. However now I enjoy giving myself a lot of room, draw charts, diagrams, wireframes, whatever it takes for my visual learning brain to say… “This is what makes sense right now.”
If you don’t know your audience – ask questions to learn more.
Your audience might be a visual learner. If you don’t know, ask.
If you’re making documentation for a visual learner…
Do more visual and less words. Try to boil the ocean with icons. I like flaticon.com.
If you’re wrapping text over and over it’s because you’re not really sure what you’re saying. Like a powerpoint where you’re staring at bullets that wrap. That’s junk. You’re not prepared. You should be reading that text. Powerpoint is not for wrapping text. It’s for presenting information. Your mouth is the wrapping text.
Visual learners don’t mind wrapping text, but I hope you’re enjoying the points I’m making by not only speaking about one topic. I think these are called analogies with some functional results.
What are you trying to say to a visual learner? Saying things to visual learner is like them drinking from a fire hose nozzle and you’re the fire hose conductor.
I know I need to tell someone I’m a visual learner as soon as they hit me with more than a paragraph and I’ve not seen anything visual. Like a recruiter saying “we have xgoogle people here” and in my mind I’m thinking “the people who didn’t cut it at google are here?” But if they had shown me a photo of them and what they created I would have never formed this strange opinion about them being flunkies.
I’m a visual learner and I love to document things to help my brain understand things better.
My brain needs to see a visual before it completely comprehends everything.
Getting a lot of information in form of chapters is not inviting for a visual learner like myself. I hate books, I need a lot of pages open at once and if I take pages out of the book it degrades the book and then pages will fall out of the book. I believe this is rather destructive and not the point of a book but that’s the basis of why I struggled the most in college. So i did my best to put the entire chapter on one piece of paper. This allowed me to boil the ocean, only bring what’s important, and helped me learn I can write really fucken small.
This is often lacking in my client engagements and I enjoy filling the gap. Also, if I can’t visually see everything at a high level it’s hard to suggest a path forward from a solution perspective.
Anyone can build powerful visual documentation if they try.
In an office setting or WFH, I prefer writing my notes on paper and if it’s good enough I move it from paper to digital. Pencil to paper in my opinion is therapeutic.
[TYLER RAMBLE] In an office setting writing on a dry erase board you’re left with “that’s what she said” or “that’s what she said” and “here’s my cell phone look at what we had on whiteboard.” What we had on a whiteboard is rather difficult to get sign off on. If you do not digitize the whiteboard immediately you’re staring at a picture. Trying to get someone to agree to something is difficult. Adding a layer of “we erased the board” isn’t helping a solution. Moving to pencil and paper has been the best. Flipping to what happened is helpful.
The more I’m in technology consulting the more I need to document. Documenting is essential. Good documentation is cool. Dry erase boards are cool but should not the source of “next steps” because it’s “done” that day. Figma allows me to remove this paradigm.
We all need to document better. I hope this blog explains how you can document better using free applications. Free applications are cool.
Visual documenting is fun on figma, and I’m kind-of-a-big-deal
Jokes aside, visual documents VS text documents or “erased” documents is powerful in all industries.
I started on photo editing and graphic design when I was a teenager in the mall.
I was fortunate that the company that hired me to sell things in their kiosk at the mall also had a head quarters for processing images, which taught me about photoshop.
Later in college it was cool to see our professor suggesting photoshop and me being able to offer suggestions during class. I’ve been using it for awhile.
Since college I’ve always enjoyed documenting and this is a quick blog about what I’m working on right now.
Having paid the money for photoshop, or rather adobe cloud. I’m familiar with these apps. My opinion has 15 years of photoshop under its belt…
Photoshop is good for visual documentation and it’s very similar to other apps that are great, like figma. Figma is free, multiplayer, and not exactly like photoshop. When it comes to “photo editing” depth or crazy filters, go with that app. If it’s website related, 2d objects, and not a depth of photo development needed then you should check out figma because the features are great.
Today, I started a training call with my team mate Dave. We started working on a project together before xmas, now I’m realizing he needs a quick ramp up on Tableau.
Documentation about each button in tableau desktop.
Building visual documentation
“Information about a work of art is often conveyed in images of it, made for the purposes of reproduction, study, examination, documentation, or teaching.
Visual documentation about a work of art may include historic photographs, conservation photographs, or installation photographs from a particular exhibition. Information about related visual documentation provides references to available reproductions or documentary images of a work of art.
Certain types of visual documentation, such as historic photographs, may enhance understanding of a work of art, identify its subject, or establish facts about its creation and history.”
– source
Visual documentation to me is important because I’m a visual learner.
I love visual documentation. Clients love visual documents.
My visual documentation is what helps clients know I’m the right choice.
Wiki calls documentation; Documentation is any communicable material that is used to describe, explain or instruct regarding some attributes of an object, system or procedure, such as its parts, assembly, installation, maintenance and use.[1] Documentation can be provided on paper, online, or on digital or analog media, such as audio tape or CDs. Examples are user guides, white papers, online help, and quick-reference guides. Paper or hard-copy documentation has become less common.[citation needed] Documentation is often distributed via websites, software products, and other online applications. Documentation as a set of instructional materials shouldn’t be confused with documentation science, the study of the recording and retrieval of information. – source
In this blog, I’m showing how I need to make visual documentation for for multiple tableau consulting gurus to be able to train themselves or others on things that I feel that I’ve repeated often in a SaaS product called Tableau Desktop.
Lately I’ve been working towards being able to communicate my development in a way that any audience will understand. This is even more challenging while doing it in person, while writing it here allows me to consider gaps that I may not have considered prior to writing the content.
Documentation needs to be visual to be grasped by many audiences.
Documentation is art.
Photo Of A Colorful Ceiling on pexels
Plus, if there’s text, it should be written in a language that I feel non-technical people will be able to grasp.
Figma is a great application for beginning this process of operationalizing great ideas. Operationalizing is documenting your idea so that it becomes less of a fuzzy concept.
Thanks for learning a little more about visual documentation with me, Tyler garrett.
Don’t forget to add me on twitter. Also, if you need inspiration for blogs, you can use pexels as a source of inspiration as it is a growing community of unique content.
