05.18.07

Tableau

Posted at 1:33 pm by James

After 7+ years of college, I realized that I knew what I wanted to be doing with my career, and that it was time to start doing it. Moving back to WA was a nice corollary of that decision, and for the past three months I’ve been looking for software development jobs in the Seattle area.

Thus, I’m happy to announce that as of yesterday, I’ve officially accepted a position at Tableau Software, Inc. beginning in June. What do they do, you ask? Tableau makes software that provides visual analysis of data. What kinds of data? Lots: anything that fits in a database or spreadsheet. You can check out a short video summary here. Plug your database into Tableau 3.0, drag and drop your data types/variables onto axes, and you’ll get some beautiful graphs and illustrations to help you see important issues and trends. “Visualization” is not a new thing, but Tableau has hit a sweet spot that can bring visual analysis to many more people besides the “company’s analytics specialist” - the software has already won a few Best Product type awards, and there appear to be huge opportunities ahead.

After looking at dozens and dozens of companies and giving a half-dozen interviews, I think this is a great fit for me. I’m excited about the mission of helping people make better decisions about their data. They’re using a wide variety of technologies, languages, and strategies that I’ll get the opportunity to master. It’s a small start-up company, about four years old, that is just getting started and yet is already profitable. Best of all, I’ve liked what I’ve seen of their people and culture, and look forward to having fun with and learning from a group of smart, experienced people.

So that’s the news. I’ll probably recount a few more recent experiences soon. We’ll probably be settled and unpacked in north-side Seattle by Independence Day - fireworks at Gas Works Park, anyone?

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