ACE Spotlight Series: Alexander Gross

[MeganDibble]

Today’s ACE spotlight is @grossal! Keep reading to learn more about Alexander and what makes him a unique Alteryx super user.

Tell us a bit about your professional background. 

Every part of my journey seems to have contributed to my current self. I started as a quality manager for a couple of years, mainly crashing mobile apps, websites, and dashboards. During that time, I partially had to create a dashboard myself and started to realize my love for numbers. Soon after that realization, I switched to management assistance, mainly focusing on analyzing numbers and processes.

It might sound surprising what comes next, but I started to do research on a mathematician from the 16th century. Why? Why not? Try out new things to widen your horizon.

  

The last and most current chapter focuses on automating data pipelines and will probably stick longer than the previous fun ones.

What is one fun thing about you that community members might not know? 

I have written two books about a mathematician from the 16th century. Unfortunately, both are in German. It's kind of fun because there's probably no one in Germany by the age of 26 that has written a book on historic math, so why not be the first one? And I was actually offered to go into this field, but yeah, it’s not really my type of field.

Also, I like to walk. A lot. I attend "Mammutmarsch" events. These events are walks in three distances: 33km, 55km, or 100km. So far, I have finished both 33km, and 55km walks. The amazing part about these events is: It's not about speed - nobody gets a medal for finishing first. Everyone helps each other and pushes you across your limits to the goal line.

What is your favorite Alteryx tool, and why? 

Input. Every workflow starts there. It seems like the most simple tool, but ... in the past, most projects failed because we couldn't connect to the data. The Input tool makes it so easy, that we forget the struggle we had before.

What has been your favorite Alteryx project? 

There have been so many. I tend to dig into these really tech-heavy and extremely complicated projects, and all of them have been a great challenge. One of my favorite projects was to trigger workflows with an NFC (Near Field Communication) tag. I could tap my phone to the tag, and it would run the workflow. My future vision for this project was to make a report wall in an office where people could bring their phones close to a picture of a report hanging up and then get the workflow results emailed to them.

What is your favorite Alteryx memory? 

Inspire Denver 2022. It was my first, to be honest, and it was a stunning experience. I keep saying to friends that it was the best week of my life. Meeting all the other ACEs felt like a family reunion - even though I have never met them before in person.

What advice do you have for new community members?

Don't focus on learning; focus on what you enjoy and like. Alteryx changed my career because I liked it so much that I couldn't stop using it and not because I simply wanted to learn, learn, learn. In times of continuous grind and people showing off with certifications, you stick out the most if you enjoy what you are doing and develop a passion for it.

What is your favorite way to engage as an ACE? Also, what area of the online community do you spend the most time in?

That's an easy one: sharing knowledge. This can happen in various ways, but mostly in blogs and user groups. I have written 50+ blogs for the German community to help build it up. Alteryx and the ACE program changed my life, and it's time to give something back to the community that helped me become who I am today.

So you are a user group leader in addition to being an ACE. Why did you become a user group leader (UGL)? 

I like to talk Alteryx--a lot. Becoming an Alteryx User Group Leader helped me to connect to even more Alteryx users and talk about it more and more and more.

What is the easiest and the hardest part of being a UGL? 

That's a good one. The hardest part was convincing myself to actually ask the other UG leaders if I could join them. The easiest part is being one and enjoying it. It is so fun to plan and hold these meetings and connect with all the other people.

What was your best experience during a UG Meeting (professional networking, personal development, career evolution, etc...)? 

I love it when I see familiar faces in the UG, and people return over and over again and join me, Roland, and the others when we overrun another meeting. A fun one happened 1.5 years ago when we optimized a double-nested macro with 20+ tools into a single tool.

I heard you were at Inspire Amsterdam last week. What were your takeaways?

Never ever do four presentations at one Inspire again. It was simply too much. I did enjoy every single presentation, but – combined with other meetings – I wasn’t able to listen to a single session on my own. In future Inspires, I’ll try to do 1-2 talks so that I can still join other sessions and have a less tight schedule. Anyhow, I did have a lot of fun at the evening events!

You did four sessions--that’s crazy! What were the topics?

The first session was together with Roland Schubert (another ACE) about collaborative workflow building. Alteryx has more than 280 tools, and nobody can know them all. Building workflows together will close that gap and can act as an immediate peer review from your colleague too!

The second session was a re-take from my Inspire Denver session (which was voted top 3) about the Beauty of Python macros. Filling up a room with 200+ people was yet again a stunning experience. Find out more in my blog article about it.

The third one was together with Alteryx Evangelist Joshua Burkhow about having fun with messy spreadsheets. I have never had a session that funny. We both fought and joked about the better solution while trying to explain Design Patterns to the audience.

Closing it, I did a Session with Tim Kessler from Siemens Energy to showcase their Alteryx journey, as well as an amazing use case that saved them 6+ months on average for every new factory.

Silly question... if you were a kitchen appliance/utensil, what would you be and why? 

The fridge—people often don't realize that it doesn't work without me. (Just like how organizations don’t notice IT until something breaks.)

Ok, now finally, let’s do a quick “This or That” to get to know your Alteryx preferences!

Tune in next week for another spotlight article!