You may have heard by now that the Qlik Luminary program has shifted to be more customer focused, which I think is good.

Those of us who were previously Qlik Luminaries are proud to have received the designation “Luminary Alumni” but some of us don’t  go so quietly.

That is  why we have formed the “Qlik Illuminati”, a shadowy cabal of former Luminaries.

As soon as this pandemic thing is over, we will be holding our first worldwide meeting in a secret  ice cave or mountain bunker somewhere (If you have an ice cave or mountain bunker available for rent, please contact our events coordinator).

Do you doubt our power and influence? Ever wonder why you see Mike Tarallo only on the “green screen”?  That’s because we abducted him and Ralf distilled Mike into pure code.  MikeBot now reads our scripts! We let physical Mike go  (we’re not brutes, we’re technicians) but an unfortunate side-effect of the distillation process is that Mike now seems unable to focus on a single topic for more than 60 seconds.

We have been incredibly successful in getting our “Q” symbol insinuated everywhere — in social media, signs at demonstrations, footage  on the nightly news. Everywhere.

The “R” users think we’re crazy — they think they are the real deal. But we know that Q are the rational ones.

I bet you’re looking for a list of Q Illuminati members. Sorry I can’t share that with you. We are a shadowy organization. (Ralf, did I say Ralf? I meant Ralph! Oh well…)

Yours Truly,
Q

Who started this April 1 foolery anyways?

I just wrapped up the week at Qonnections 2018.  I found it to be an inspiring conference and the most positive I’ve attended in years.

What was inspiring?  The cognitive insights demo was fantastic.  This is the future of BI.  We have well understood principles and algorithms recently formalized in the discipline of machine learning. Let’s incorporate them in the tool.   If the goal of data visualization is to amplify cognition of data, then I would say cognitive insights is to visualization as visualization is to data.

On the technical front, the previews and demos of elastic cloud and Qlik Core provided me the “aha” moment to understand how the Qlik Big Data Index will be possible.  I can see how many distributed indexing and aggregation engines can provide massively scalable access to a data lake.

The most exciting announcement to me wasn’t technical, but on the commercial side.  For a “small uptick in maintenance”,  QlikView  users will be entitled to use the same license for Qlik Sense.  To me this signals a new strategy for dealing with the two products going forward.  There was also a roundtable discussion on feature gap between the two products and the announcement that some level of pixel-perfect control will be available in Qlik Sense.

Taken together with main stage comments from CEO Mike Capone and CTO Mike Potter,  I’m seeing a needed correction to the “two product strategy” which so heavily favored Qlik Sense.  No one expects QlikView to live forever,  but loyal QlikView customers want to adopt a new product only when they see that it clearly benefits them.   Ideally we will see a converging product that blends the best features and lessons learned from both products.

-Rob

Are you going to Qonnections in Orlando April 23?   I’ll be there and presenting three breakout sessions.  In addition to checking in with colleagues and hearing about what’s new, here are some things I’m looking forward to:

• Hearing from the new Leadership team
• Qlik Core!
• Learning more about subscription pricing
• Freakonomics!

I’ll be presenting three technical breakout sessions.

148255 – Options and Levels for Qlik Sense Mashup Integration: Tuesday 10:30am  –  This session aims to introduce you to the possibilities for re-using Qlik Sense content and data in other applications such as web pages.  We’ll cover the very simple “codeless”  embedding using URLs all the way through data fetching and custom visualization using enigma.js.   This session is suitable for technical and management staff who want to understand the potential in mashups and get a measure of the effort involved.  My colleague Nick Webster will be joining me in this presentation.

148870 – Automated Testing of Qlik Applications:  Tuesday 3:00pm – A favorite of mine, I’ll be discussing and demonstrating the free regression testing tools from Qlik that allow you to completely automate the QA testing of your Qlik — both Qlik Sense and QlikView — applications.  I’ll also touch on some current trends in unit testing and operational monitoring.

148256 – QlikView Document Performance Tuning Using Document Analyzer:  Thursday 9:30am – Document Analyzer (DA) is a popular free tool that can be used to examine and improve the performance of a QlikView document.  In this session I’ll be showing the tool and my typical approach to improving the response time of a specific document.  Admittedly,  Document Analyzer has little documentation so consider this your DA training session. If you’ve never seen DA,  Dalton Ruer, aka @QlikDork recently produced a  DA intro video.

Other sessions I hope I can make it to:  Nick Webster’s “Putting Qlik in a Mirror” – just for the wow factor;  Göran Sander’s sessions on Butler SOS and SenseOps;  Sessions on Qlik Core and View/Sense coexistence.  Sadly  I’m going to miss Speros Kokenes’ sessions because he’s scheduled at the same time as me.

I’ll also be hanging around in the Discovery Expo — look for the hat at the Masters Summit booth or elsewhere.

Hope to see you there!

-Rob

Summary: This post has nothing to do with Qlik. It’s a reach out to the community I have built over the years soliciting holiday recommendations.

I have a two week holiday break between the Masters Summit for Qlik in Prague 3 April and Qonnections 23 April.

My wife Linda favors warm so we are heading south.

Through my experience with this site and the greater Qlik Community,  I’ve been  blessed to travel and make  friends all over the world.  So now I’m reaching out to that larger community with a question that has nothing to do to with Qlik or BI.

Should we spend two weeks in Southern Spain or one week in Spain and another in Morocco?

I’m expecting to hear from my Portuguese, Greek and other friends as well 😉

Where would you go with those two weeks in April?

-Rob

This past spring I enjoyed a glorious week of whitewater kayaking with Noah Weinstein at the incredible Otterbar Lodge on Northern California’s Salmon river.

Noah runs the Artists In Residence program at Autodesk’s Pier 9 Workshop in San Francisco.  Autodesk is a long time big QlikView customer and the Pier 9 Workshop is a working lab that demonstrates and tests practical applications of Autodesk products.

During downtime at Otterbar Lodge, Noah introduced me to the work of sculptor Adrien Segel.  Adrien sources data sets of observations from the natural world and transforms those data into beautiful, fascinating and challenging sculptures.

Adrien’s “Wind at Ravenswood Slough” project visualizes wind speed and direction over a 48 hour period at a single location. The Y-axis (vertical) represents time, the X-axis (length of the bars) represent speed — and here’s the advantage of a physical 3-D rendition — the Z-axis indicates wind direction.

Mount the finished sculpture  at the site where the data was collected and you have a deep understanding and delightfully personal relationship with data.  Brilliant!

Check out some of Adrien’s other projects like the  Snow Water Equivalent Cabinet  I found this dataset personally  interesting because of my love of rivers and river seasons.  Adrien takes a direct approach in mapping the data and the  result is a functional, fascinating  and intimate piece of furniture.

Can data be beautiful?  I think so.

-Rob

Join us at the free QDG event in SF on June 28 from 5:30pm to 8:30pm.  The easy to access location is 44 Montgomery, same building as Montgomery BART.

We’ve got a great lineup in store with David Freriks of Qlik talking about the latest big data strategies, Patrick Vinton  of QlikMaps showing off some innovative GeoSpatial analytics, as well as community presenters Gerry Castellino and Rob Wunderlich covering data heirarchies and automated testing. The full program can be viewed here.

Have you been to a Qlik Dev Group meetup yet?   The meetings are free, volunteer run and take place all over the world.  At QDG diverse speakers from Qlik and the greater community give technical presentations on topics of interest to Qlik Developers.

It’s a place to share technology, practices and tips in a non-competitive, no-selling environment.

If you can join us in SF on June 28, please pre-register here. If you are not in the SF Bay Area, check the QDG site  to find a group in your region.

Hope to see you on June 28!

-Rob