This isn’t meant an an exhaustive list but just the most common errors I’ve seen over the years. Taking the average of values that are already an average Trying to join database tables on fields with different data types Processing data you will later discard, do filtering early on Using averages when mean or mode …
Author archives: Bob Peers
Money As Data
Current ‘Digital’ Money As much as many people use banking apps and send money via their smartphones, money isn’t really digital yet. What do I mean by ‘not digital’? Of course it doesn’t mean you need to physically transfer paper money and metal coins to buy a coffee. You can of course do this digitally …
How to Make Decisions š¤
For those that like a nice process for making decisions here’s a Decision-Making Tree. It may seem lighthearted but most decisions are not actually that important. Most of the time it’s probably better just to choose a path and move forward. If it’s wrong but trivial to fix later why bother delaying over the choice? …
Delete Files Using Alteryx
Yet another custom tool for Alteryx to fill a hole in the file handling capabilities without resorting to using the Run Command tool. Available to download and install from Github (https://github.com/bobpeers/Alteryx_SDK_Delete) or you can grab a sample workflow including link to the tool from the Alteryx Public Gallery (https://gallery.alteryx.com/#!app/File-Delete/5f4770d8826fd309c4f9e427) The tool uses the standard Python …
Credentials – Custom Alteryx Tool
Why Saving Credentials is Hard š Saving credentials for use in an Alteryx workflow is a very common use case. Maybe you use an API and need to save Client keys or secrets and getting these credentials into a workflow without hard coding is tricky. It’s common to either read from a text file located …
Magento Commerce API Fun š
As a consultant you get to work with many different systems, some easy, some difficult and some downright weird. Magento Commerce fits firmly into the last category. For those that don’t know Magento is a very popular E-commerce platform owned by Adobe and used by some of the largest companies in the world. How APIs …
Custom Alteryx Tools
So far I’ve written four Alteryx tools based on the Alteryx Python SDK. You can install by downloading the yxi file under the releases tab in GitHub and simply double click to install. The tools will be available in the Alteryx Tool menus and function just like the built-in tools that ship with Alteryx. Data …
File Hashing in Alteryx
Identifying Duplicate Files Imagine you have a folder full of files, all with different names, where you need to identify which, if any, are duplicates. You could use the file size but it’s not a guarantee the files are exactly the same just because they are the same size. Hashing files is an easy way …
Bitcoin Proof of Work
(With try yourself code!) As much as bitcoin (note here Iām talking about the software also known as bitcoin core) is a highly complex system many of the basic elements can be fairly easily described and demonstrated. Here I’ll demonstrate a very simple example using python showing how mining works and how something called ‘difficulty’ …
You Should Probably Learn To Code
There’s been a clear trend going on for many years now known as ‘No code’ or ‘Low code’. This essentially describes tools or platforms that provide you with a GUI that abstracts away the underlying technicalities so non-technical users can use powerful software. Doing this has been a huge benefit to business since the addressable …