Ode to my Lenovo

Two weeks back, my trusty Lenovo Z51-70 laptop gave up the ghost. It was showing signs well before that; consistently dropping my network connection, lagging severely when saving files and most tellingly, a noticeable flicker on the monitor. Can't say it didn't give me fair warning when on Saturday, it refused to power on.

Now, that was a sentimental moment.

Rest well, my friend.

I first obtained this flat white beauty during a Christmas Sale in 2014, when I was about to begin a Specialist Diploma in Mobile Apps Development. While my company at the time had issued me a decent notebook, I didn't feel comfortable using company property for my personal enterprise. I had a personal laptop, but it was on its last legs. Thus, I went for an i5 Intel Core that would meet my programming needs.

2015 to 2017

2015 was the second semester of my Specialist Diploma in Mobile Apps Development. With Java being the operating language, I installed Eclipse and the Java Runtime Environment. I also had NodeJS installed, and wrote apps in jQuery Mobile to deploy onto the mobile phone. This would perhaps be the most serious and intensive period of using the Lenovo.

Mobile app development.

Somewhere along the way, in addition to my steady diet of HTML, CSS and JavaScript experimentation, I experimented with things QBasic, LESS and AngularJS. An odd mix, I know, but I was having fun.

MeteorJS came along for me in early 2017. The lessons I learned here would help me years later when I experimented with ReactJS.

2017 to 2019

This was the period of my life where I settled down into a regular nine-to-five. I still experimented on weekends, writing D3 and ReactJS code. It was also the time I picked up Ruby and Rails, for whatever reason.

Like a stallion.

The Lenovo handled it all like a champ. It was tireless, inexhaustible, like a stallion in its prime.

Around the latter half of this period, I started working on my ACTA. Whatever work I needed done, I did it on my trusty laptop.

At some point during this period, I also got married. Late nights at the console were no longer viable, not if I wanted to sleep in the same bed as my wife. Still, I squeezed in whatever time I could.

2019 to 2023

This was the year the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and marked one of the longest durations my wife and I were geographically separated. During this time, my work on the Lenovo intensified, with me trying out Highcharts and VueJS.

During this period, however, I had acquired a MacBook and was gradually transitioning away from my faithful Lenovo which was starting to show its years.

Getting pretty old.

It was also when I embarked on my yet another Specialist Diploma, this time in Data Analytics. The MacBook handled Python and Tableau, but only my Lenovo could run Spotfire and  Power BI. It creaked and groaned, but ultimately delivered.

Why is this particular laptop special?

Why do I feel so strongly about this fella? It's not the first laptop to die on me, after all. I've lived more than forty years. But the last nine years of my professional life have been pretty tumultuous, and also represented the bulk of my career advancement and tech education, spanning two Specialist Diplomas and a Higher Certificate. This Lenovo was with me through all of it. I played no games on it. All I did was write code, and run code. (Some of that code were games I wrote, but we're just splitting hairs at that point!)

Much of whatever important files I have are saved on the cloud - on Google Drive, GitHub and Trello. Thankfully, I can resume my work on a new machine with little trouble. But I'll always treasure my time with this machine.

Rest In PC,
T___T

Software Review: Power BI

Forays into Data Visualization as an integral part of Data Analytics, have brought me in contact with several Data Visualization tools. One of these is Microsoft's offering, PowerBI. The "BI" part of the name, of course, stands for Business Intelligence, which is one of the use cases for Data Analytics.

If you have a need for ETL that will ultimately factor into your Business Intelligence, this is what PowerBI is for. Of course, PowerBI is not just about Business Intelligence. Any use case you may have involving transformation and visualization of data, will be handled by PowerBI.

The Premise

PowerBI is a desktop (or cloud-based, depending on your package) application that takes a data source or several, and combines them into a slick narrative, cumulating in charts, dashboards and storyboards.

The Aesthetics

Power BI follows a similar aesthetic to most Microsoft products. This means that if you're familiar with Access, SQL Server or Excel, you will feel pretty much at home right off the bat, whether it's managing dataset relationships or cleaning data.

Outside of data visualization colors, white and grey are predominant with button mostly in yellow. There's the occasional flash of green.

The Experience

Honestly, I found Power BI intimidating. Just for the simple task of importing datasets, there was a whole host of options to choose from. Further into the actual cleaning and visualization of data, each task had a blinding array of configuration options.

Thankfully, Power BI manages to stick to a well-established workflow - import data, clean and merge, create analytics, visualize.

The Interface

While the interface can get a little crowded, much of it is safely ignored with little consequence. For the most part, controls are straightforward and easy to find especially if you have had prior experience with Microsoft products.

Of special mention is the relationship relation interface. For such a busy looking display, the process of merging various datasets was relatively direct. And it was not clumsy.

What I liked

The meat of the software, as far as I'm concerned, is in the visualization. On that score, I wasn't disappointed. There are tons of chart types and dashboard options, with each chart highly customizable.

Simple things are easy enough to accomplish if you don't get distracted by all the other interface elements.

Statistical information about the data is available right off the bat when you view it, with more options available if you want it.

I've mentioned this before but it's great that the UI is mostly consistent with other Microsoft products.

What I didn't

Power BI Desktop is free. The costs of Pro or Premium seem a little high, though perhaps this can be justified with scaled-up use cases.

I found the going slow at times. This may be improved with the Pro or Premium versions, and may just be a result of me running Power BI on my ridiculously old Windows machine. Use on a Macbook was a no-go last I checked.

The screen can sometimes get a little crowded with the sheer amount of controls provided. Half of which I will probably never use.

Conclusion

PowerBI isn't what I would call a slick little package. It has a whole host of functions and sometimes all that can be overwhelming. Still, it's good enough for most cases even if the functions I really need are sometimes annoyingly elusive, hidden amongst a ton of related functionality.

I would absolutely recommend PowerBI for your Business Intelligence use cases. And if you can afford it, PowerBI Premium or PowerBI Pro.

My Rating

7 / 10

Powerful stuff!
T___T

How I Learned Data Visualization

Recent years have seen me dwelve into Data Analytics. But even before that, I was exploring Data Visualization.

It all began when I ran some experiments with HTML, CSS and JavaScript to produce bar charts. That was straightforward enough, though line charts and pie charts took a lot more creativity.

HTML//CSS/JavaScript projects.

During one of my job interviews, I came across something in the list of required skills - D3 or Highcharts. I did not pass that interview, but after seeing that requirement in other job descriptions, I got curious enough to look it up. What I found blew my mind.

Exploring D3

D3 was the first thing I explored on the official website. Half of the library functions did not make sense to me and I have never been great at reading documentation. Thus, there was one thing left to do. I copied the example code and pasted it into a script, then ran it. Then I started changing the code, finding out what would happen when I commented out certain lines, or changed certain numbers. With my findings, I now knew what to look up on the documentation.

D3 projects

Within a week of practice, I was able to replicate the results of my earlier experiments, but now using D3. And then I wrote web tutorials pertaining to creating that code, because teaching code is a great way to cement that knowledge in your brain.

My experimentation was stalled somewhat due to the fact that exploring D3 naturally brought me to explore SVG as well. This was fun as well, but only peripherally related to Data Visualization.

Exploring Highcharts

This portion of my exploration was delayed due to several reasons - struggles with the chaos caused in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, experimentation in other areas and generally, bigger fish to fry. Yet, get to it I did eventually. Again, it began with the documentation in the official website, example code and a lot of trial and error before I produced my first web tutorial.

Highcharts project

At the time of this writing, I have yet to produce as extensively as I have done with D3. The only thing I have produced is a column chart in the same vein of what I had produced earlier with D3 and old-fashioned HTML, CSS and JavaScript... yet it was so easy that I suspect that even if I were to produce as many projects, it would not take me a lot of time.

I will sing the praises of Highcharts some other time.

Exploring other Data Visualization tools

Harkening back to almost the whole of 2021, I undertook a course in Data Analytics, an experience of which I will speak of another day. Suffice to say, part of the course covered Data Visualization. To whit, I was introduced to Data Visualization software which I had never encountered prior to this, such as Tableau, Spotfire and Power BI.

Data Visualization tools

It opened my eyes. Now I was no longer writing code to display the data; it was already being handled by these tools. Instead, I was doing the work prior to the Data Visualization. The cleaning. The reorganization. Making things make sense.

In other words, I was working on another level of the Data Visualization. I won't pretend that it wasn't sometimes mind-numbingly boring work, but it did give me a greater appreciation of the process.

All in all...

My little dive into Data Visualization was mostly brought on by professional curiosity. A curiosity that was in turn triggered by my almost obsessive need to know what things my industry wants of its professionals. But all the knowledge I have gained would not have been possible had I not followed up with the work required. This sounds like a lot of patting myself on the back, but what I really want to say is - stay curious, stay committed. It'll go a long way.

Serious as a chart attack,
T___T