The MEANStack Newsletter, Issue II
02/25/2022 - Some of you read my newsletter last week and it made me cry, it's not MEANStack but Tableau is rad, and I found "ONE MEAN" Expert
Welcome back and thanks for reading!
I was overwhelmed by the stats when I saw them this week - 198 of y’all opened my newsletter. Some of y’all probably may have only done so to unsubscribe, on accident, or whatever - but I know some of y’all read my newsletter, so I don’t care if 196 of you didn’t. I’ve never had anything close to 198 opens in a first newsletter - so I cried (it’s been a long year). Tears of joy and that feeling like I can do this. Thank you so, so much!
If you aren’t into development, but maybe know somebody who likes tech or web development, please share my newsletter - you have no idea how helpful it is! Both mentally and hopefully financially someday if I’ve earned it. I don’t write for the money even though I really, like really could use some money. But I could have just sold insurance or something if money was that important to me. I write the MEANStack newsletter so I can learn and then teach, inspire, or entertain you. My hope is that I can turn somebody onto full-stack software development the same way I got turned onto it - web development is such an important part of who I am now.
Enough rambling…. onto Data Visualization! YEEHAW!
It’s not MEANStack… but it’s Tableau, and it’s awesome
Yeah, I know, there’s not “T” in “MEAN” - but I spent the early afternoon visualizing data by myself before attending the General Assembly Tableau Livestream by Branden Kornell. Branden Kornell is a Superdata-Man: he’s a business intelligence/Tableau expert, consultant, developer, manager - it seems he’s done about every job you can with Tableau.
Branden holds a BA in psychology from Brandeis University and an MBA from Boston University - he is very intelligent and has a deep passion for visualizing data. I’m jealous of Branden because he gets to do all the cool stuff that I want to do - psychology, business intelligence, and making data look really cool on Tableau.
If you aren’t familiar with Tableau, think of Microsoft Excel on crack and scaled out by like millions in terms of size. Rather than spreadsheets, think of charts and graphs. Tableau is wonderful if you have a lot of data that you need to present or if you need to use that data to make a business decision. The data visualization software really kicks ass at presenting data easily by dragging and dropping fields to sum data from across multiple sources, various interactive controls, and geographical maps.
Let’s look at a table of data on Tableau that Branden made (I hid details to make a scenario for y’all):
Let’s say that since the title bars are cut off, this chart represents the hours worked by employees on each day for 2022 at ABC Company. The hours on the left side will be the time of day the hours were recorded. The hot days and times are Monday-Friday at 800 and 1600-1800.
This information can be used in a lot of interesting ways, business and economics wise. An HR Manager with little data science experience could grab that chart and say - “why ain’t anyone doing their job at 10 AM on a Monday?!?” The boss who hates presentations and charts can look and go - aha! We just need to automate more where productivity is the lowest! That darn Tableau sure does turn big data into big bucks!
I love meeting people who are trying to use Excel to present a large amount of data and then introducing them to Tableau - people just laugh about all the wasted time. There was no way I could leave Tableau out of the newsletter today after the virtual class because data science and data virtualization excite me more than Christmas Eve. It is necessary for most jobs to be able to interpret data, so I suggest learning Tableau, how to use Excel, or SASS if you don’t already have a favorite statistical tool.
Alright - more on my blog on Tableau, but I got to get back to MEAN Stack talk.
Podcast with MEAN Expert Ben Casarrubias
I love living in the South - the weather has been super nice for February, so I have been walking the dog ALOT (I need to get out of this apartment once in a while) and also have been finding a lot of hidden treasure, podcast episodes lately.
I discovered an older episode from March 23rd, 2017 on The NoSQL Database Podcast. The title caught my attention, but I got pulled in when the podcast host, Nic Raboy, introduced the guest as “The Mean Expert”. It was an interesting episode and all - I’m not going to recap it for you because you can read/listen to it here. The guest, Jonathan Casarrubias was great and does a wonderful job explaining how all the tech parts of the MEAN stack work together.
What shook my bones was getting home and looking up the “mean expert”. Google led me to the GitHub account: the MEAN Expert Official Account for Amazing MEAN Open Source Modules and dammit, they are pure gold. There’s a tool for auto-generating SDKs for Loopback, a starter kit for the fireloop.io platform, and a model register module. My web dev tools coin radar hit the jackpot - I plan on using this GitHub repository to create something really cool over the weekend to share with y’all.
Subscribe and follow me Andy Weisbeck (@GeauxWeisbeck4) to see my projects live in action - I promise I now am on track to start getting my work out. It’s been a really challenging and busy few months and I’m finally seeing my hard work learning pay off.
My blog will be released tonight - I guarantee that so check out my content page for the blog, newsletters, and other resources. I’m also going to get my domain linked to my site - I tried to transfer it between hosts too quickly after purchasing geauxweisbeck4.dev, so I’m sitting in web developer portfolio purgatory on GitHub for now.
If you are feeling gracious, I would appreciate any help to pay for research and creating projects - you can hire me to build you your own website, create a resume, develop software, and much more. Please reach out to me on my website as I am developing my store. You can also subscribe to my newsletter on Substack - thank you to those who already have - you rock!
Even better than sending money is sharing my newsletter to as many people as you can - I just want people to check it out and give feedback so I can make it better :).
Thank you for reading again this week! Please subscribe, tell a friend, or email me a funny story at andrew.weisbeck@gmail.com.