First Day of DS20…Working from home!

by Micol Bedarida

I would have never imagined that I’d start my first job working from home. But just over a week ago, it became much more real. We all received laptops shipped to our homes together with other goodies. This was a very exciting moment. If you don’t believe me, have a look at this photo – don’t I look excited?

Monday morning, 8:55am

It is finally here – the first day of DS20!! After a walk through blue-sky-London, I am sipping a cup of coffee at my desk, ready for the first call of the day. I am a bit nervous but mainly excited.

11:20am

After almost two and a half hours of setting up our laptops via Zoom, my brain needs a break. How am I going to make it through the rest of the day?

3:30pm

After some interesting introductions by Tom Brown and our coaches Andy and Carl, we are told that we have an hour to do this week’s Makeover Monday. Only one hour? It usually takes me a whole day to do a Makeover Monday! Panic ensues

3:40pm

Why is there no ‘number of records’ pill? Am I going crazy? More panic. I decide to create a calculated field instead and to worry about this later. (Turns out, the new version of Tableau doesn’t have number of records and that we will learn about this later on)

4:10pm

Only 20 minutes left. There is so much more background reading I want to do and graphs I want to plot, but I am running out of time. So I better start thinking about putting together a dashboard.

4:25pm

Only 5 minutes left. What are some things I can quickly do to make my dashboard a tiny bit more presentable? Tooltips it is!

4:30pm

Presentation time – this is my dashboard:

There were several moments between 3:30pm and 4:30pm when I feared that I’d end up with nothing to show. So although there are many problems with my dashboard, I am relieved that I had something to present.

My key takeaways from today are:

  • I survived! Yay :)))
  • The dashboards which my fellow cohortians (is that even a word?) managed to put together in an hour were very impressive. I am looking forward to working with these guys for the next 4 months.
  • Even though today was stressful, I can’t wait for the next challenge. 
  • This is by no stretch of the imagination the best dashboard I have ever created, but I created it in one hour. And because of that I should be happy.