In 2015, when I was working on perl / shell scripting and ETL, I heard about one BI tool which was creating a buzz. I searched for it on Internet and thought there are many good tools in the market and this will also fade away after some time. The very next year, I got the opportunity to learn it and I was totally hooked on to it.

Today after 4 to 5 years, here I am attending Tableau Conference-ish. Because of global pandemic situation, this conference was 100% virtual and 100% free. And this was a great opportunity for all tableau enthusiasts to come and connect with datafam, which few of us would not have done if it were offline.

As soon as I got to know that it’s happening, I booked my calendar for 3 days because I didn’t want to miss this opportunity. I knew that the community is awesome but never got a chance to connect with people from other places. During this conference, I learned a lot and connected with a lot of people in these 3 days.

At the start of the conference week (on Sunday) a tailgate event was organized by Adam Mico (Twitter), which was the first event to connect with #datafam on video. This really kicked off well and I got a feeling that I am going to meet some great people in the conference. 

A similar interface was launched by The information lab where anyone can join and connect with fellow community members during the conference. I was lucky enough to connect with Will (Twitter), Zach (Twitter) & Mark (Twitter), and conversation with these guys was super fantastic.

On Monday morning Tableau released a viz gallery which was very beautifully curated. Its interface was so well designed that it felt like you are actually standing in a real gallery and enjoying the vizzes with soothing music playing at the background. It couldn’t have been better when it's a virtual event and tableau team did a very spectacular job in bringing virtual gallery to the tableau enthusiasts.
Tableau launched the Conference interface in advance and users could register for the event in advance, select the sessions they want to attend as per their time zone, could select any channel of interest and start watching the broadcast, and also add those events to their calendar or watchlist so that they do not miss any session. A good way to keep track of how you would want to spend your time in the Conference.

The Viz song release by Tableau “One Viz More” was fantastic, and kind of set the stage. The performance by band was wonderful and mesmerizing. Day 1 Key Note (YouTube) by Adam Selipsky were great. I liked hearing about what tableau is doing to make life easier and where is tableau headed as a company. 

The content of the conference was so great, all the videos were well presented, all the gaps between the videos were filled up with some mind blowing performances by band or by information. All the event broadcast was so much smooth that it never felt like any thing is missing. It was just perfect. 

The talk about Most favorite viz by Lorna brown and Andy Kribel was very entertaining. The keynote by Neil deGrass Tyson explaining about the size of data he deals with was very interesting. He is a kind of data geek and a wonderful guy. I enjoyed listening to him about how Data becomes facts, facts become information, information becomes knowledge, knowledge becomes wisdom.

End of the day 1 was awesome and I attended a few brain dates and connected with a few great datafam community members. It was lovely to connect with a lot of people on brain-dates and happy hours and it was great.

Now as this was virtual, it was an opportunity for all the tableau enthusiasts to connect more with the community, and if it were not virtual, that probably would not have happened because few of those might not have gone to the conference or were at different event locations during conference. We shared linked-in profile links, twitter profile and personal email id to remain in contact. 

On day 2 Devs at Desks were wonderful sessions. They showed some really cool stuff that is coming in future versions. A few are map layers, server scheduling.

After this, the main event was IronViz which steal the show. It was one of the events, I was eagerly waiting for. Those 30 minutes were the most breathtaking minutes in the entire conference. In this IronViz the most notable thing was the color scheme and story execution. All 3 competitors did amazing and very impressive work. The event was very lively as judges gave comments at the same time and did the evaluation. Congratulations to Cristian Felix (Twitter) for winning IronViz 2020 competition. 



Public Profile of All 3 IronViz finalists:


After the wonderful Iron Viz, and a few other data related sessions, a happy hour session was conducted on zoom where tableau enthusiasts connected and discussed about full day events. In this session, I connected with some of the great tableau ambassadors and Zen masters. This session helped me gain a lot about the thought process of those tableau masters and how and what they think while looking at a particular visualization. There was another happy hour session where Andy Cotgreve (Twitter) showed his magic skills, and it was interesting to connect with a lot of members from datafam community.


I did a few more brain-dates where I met many fantastic participants and learned about how tableau is making a difference in their lives. It was fantastic to connect with these datafam members. I learned a lot in these sessions. 


Day 3 was also wonderful with some great broadcast videos I saw a few of them
dashboard anatomy. I saw john legend’s performance, which was really cool. Then came the Vizzie Community awards where many new nominations by the community. It was a joy to watch people getting recognized for all the work they have done in Tableau community space. Click here to see all the Vizzie Award Nominations and winners. Thanks to Emily Kund (Twitter) for this blog.


Final the happy hour where we discussed about events for all 3 days and what we learned. This was the first time I met Kevin (Twitter | Blog) and the conversation was awesome.

At the end there was a party hosted by Emily Kund to chill out and it was joined by Tableau Management for a brief time. This Conference was a success as almost 145000 Data Enthusiast had joined the Conference which is a big number.


Good News is You can still visit the Viz Gallery and check out some of the great Visualizations. And  you can still register and watch on demand sessions on TC20 website. This is awesome!!

Overall, the virtual event was fantastic and I really enjoyed connecting with many people. I would love to join this fabulous community in person when tc21 happens in Vegas next year. 

Hope you liked this overview. Looking forward to seeing you in next Tableau Conference.  ☺
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