by Katie Paige, on December 19, 2016
Whoops - if you received our holiday card before this was posted, you probably didn't find anything here. That was our bad - we drank a little too much eggnog and forgot to publish this post!
It's been an excting year here at Arkatechture. We can't believe that 365 days have gone by so quickly! Last year at this time, we were a team of just 12 Arkabots. For our holiday card, we had an awesome family portrait style Christmas photoshoot at the mall (which was definitely entertaining for the onlookers in the food court!). We knew we would have to think of something different, since we've grown our team to 25! Our Communication Designer, Kayle Simpson, had the idea for an infographic - after all, what could be a better way to measure our successes and growth but with data?
We've spent the year pulling in new sources and storing them in our data warehouse, which we call Arkabase. We currently have 11 sources loaded into Arkabase, with more on the way. A big thank you to our awesome hackers and ETL developers who set up our data to get loaded into Arkabase every day! We've documented many of our automations and integrations through our Office Intelligence blog series. We hooked up a Raspberry Pi to our coffee maker to track how much coffee we drink, did a similar thing with our popcorn machine, put our "Fresh Pots" and "Fresh Pops" together on Slack, and even made a data-driven competition out of our annual celebration of Arkatechture's founding!
Our data warehouse is completely hosted using Amazon Web Services (AWS), a move that we've encouraged and help many of our clients to make this year. 2016 was a big year for AWS at Arkatechture, with three of our developers earned a total of five AWS certifications. Way to go Chris Reed, Chris Bond and Nick Marshall!
As soon as we get a new source in our data warehouse, our vizzers immediately pull the data set into Tableau and start vizzing. We publish these to our internal Tableau Server (which is also hosted on AWS), but you can see some examples on our Tableau Public profile. Our favorite viz of 2016 using Arkabase data is Vizzin' Quest, which documented our roadtrip to the Tableau Conference. It was really fun to create the data too - picture four Arkabots in a car together for 40 hours!
We may have sent four Arkabots to Tableau Conference, but they weren't the only ones having fun and learning new data skills! We sent groups to the ODSC Conference, AWS's re:INVENT Conference, and HubSpot's INBOUND Conference. Each of these groups came back to our new office excited and fired up about their experiences at the conferences.
We are so excited for 2017, and can't wait to see what new data sources, vizzes, innovations in the data space, conferences and clients the new year will bring!!
From Arkatechture to you, Cheers and Happy Holidays!
