So week 1 and week 2 were both possible in BaseA Alteryx, although getting harder as the puzzles progress. Week 3 was the first time I needed to go beyond BaseA to find a solution for a couple of the parts (though in at least one case the community found a BaseA solution). As with a couple of years ago, doing the Advent of Code, inspired me to do more work on the Abacus library. This time I added four functions allowing for 64-bit integer-based arithmetic. The numbers need to be passed as strings and are returned as strings. The new functions are: Int64Add(a,b,c...) – sums all the inputs Int ..read more

So week 1 was well suited to Alteryx, let’s see how week 2 unfolded! A nice and gentle Sunday puzzle lulled me into the belief that it was going to be an easy week, followed by the first needed use of an iterative macro, and then something that looked far too much like the dreaded IntCode of 2019… As with last week, I’ve picked some examples from around the community for different approaches to my own. This week also saw a useful macro by Ned Harding which will download and parse the input from the Advent of Code site. I also played with a version of this, which will download the leaderboard ..read more

So it’s December and time again for the annual Advent of Code. For those not familiar, this is a set of 25 puzzles (each with 2 parts) set by Eric Wastl. They have a Christmas theme and story and are solvable with just a little programming knowledge and some puzzle-solving skills. The puzzles start quite easy and get increasingly more complicated, and part 2 can often be a lot harder. A couple of years ago, Adam Riley suggested we try solving them in Alteryx and so a new annual tradition began. It is worth noting that the puzzles do not necessarily suit Alteryx, but trying to think about how ..read more

When I was young and starting to program, one of the first things that fascinated me was generating images with fractals. Given an often simple algorithm, you can create incredible images with very little code. The Mandelbrot set is a one such. As an experiment, and to test out the AMP engine, I wanted to experiment with creating one in Alteryx. As usual, BaseA rules apply! I thought it would also be interesting for people to see some of the iterations I went through rather than just the end product. This first post is only going to concentrate on the computation of the data for the set, the ..read more

As a bit of a thought experiment, I wondered if how hard it would be to create a cubic spline interpolation within Alteryx. As with many of my games BaseA rules apply. Stealing an idea from Tasha Alfano, I thought I would do it in both python and Alteryx from first principles. A quick shout out to MathAPI – a handy site and used to render all the LaTeX to SVG. So let’s start by reviewing how to create a cubic spline and then build it up. I chose to use the algorithm as described in Wikiversity. Specifically with type II simple boundary conditions. I’m not going through the maths but will defin ..read more

Matt Parker is publishing a weekly puzzle on his Think Maths website every Wednesday. This week’s puzzle was a Coin Puzzle. This puzzle felt like one that Alteryx would be well suited to solving. Representing the Board’s State The board looks like: Each location can either have a coin or not have a coin. This means a binary representation is straight forward. Keeping the numbering order the same I choose to have 1 be the first bit through to 10 being the 10th bit. So a board like: Would be encoded to the number of 662: Position 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Total Coin 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 5 ..read more

So the lights are up across London, the weather is atrocious and the trains are going nowhere fast; so it must be time to think about the Advent of Code. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, this is a fantastic set of 25 puzzles released one by one every day in December until Christmas Day. Jesse Clark and I spoke about gamification within Alteryx at Inspire London this year. One of the ways I like to have fun with it is finding challenges which are fun to attempt to solve within the platform. The weekly challenges are a great set, but these are curated specifically for Alteryx. In the A ..read more

This post also appeared on the Alteryx Engine Works Blog. A friend on the Alteryx community recently asked me about recreating the Excel trendline capabilities within Alteryx. If you have the predictive tools installed then Alteryx has a Linear Regression tool which will fit a linear model to the set. This uses R and produces a model for the entire dataset. For my implementation, I wanted to allow for groups of data and go back to first principles and use the core Alteryx tools (i.e. no SDKs, R, or Python) to build it. Excel has 6 options for fitting a trendline to a dataset. Apart from Movin ..read more

This post first appeared on the Alteryx Community The Abacus add in is a collection of custom functions that make writing expressions in Alteryx easier or gives completely new functionality (such as variables). Originally created to make my life easier, they have grown into a powerful extension for Alteryx that can speed up the creation of complicated formulae. They focus in on a few key themes: Date and Time Probability Distributions Data Generation General Utility Variables (new in v1.4) In general, the functions have come either from my own wants for easier ways to do things or more common ..read more

So I have now completed both the Solution Architect Associate and Developer Associate certifications and thought I would share my thoughts from the process. Why Bother? For a long time, I haven’t been particularly bothered by doing any certifications. I have always believed in proving myself in the work I do, and this was particularly true when I worked as an in-house developer. As a consultant for Scott Logic, I naturally have to have a more public profile – certification is one way of saying I know a technology area. Alteryx introduced certification a couple of years ago and that was my fi ..read more