Blog #6 - Days 11-13

    Day 11 was a bit of a wash, due to the fact that I had another baseball game in Copley that afternoon, so I was left with no choice but to work from home. As a result, I continued thinking over some of the tasks Alex and Ben had given me in the previous days relating to RV Trader data and brainstorming possible ways to accomplish them with the new skills that I developed.
    Consequently, Days 12 and 13 were very busy days. These past couple of weeks, two of the main areas of focus of my senior project have been improving my Python coding skills and familiarizing myself with the data visualization platform, Tableau. Thus, in the last two days, I recommenced my work in both of these fields as Ben and I started to think about how I would present my Hawken Project.
    Seeing as my two-week Tableau free trial was set to expire at the end of Day 12, I started off by constructing a dashboard in Tableau using RV Trader data from the past four quarters. Ben wanted me to display the kinds of data that a real client might want to see in order to judge the growth of the company/website. Thus, I put together a dashboard that shows the average price, sum of price, and count of listings by date, and I feel like it is something that I will be able to present to my classmates next Friday. After sitting in on a company-wide meeting about marketing strategies and petting the adorable chihuahua that somebody had brought into the office, I put the finishing touches on the dashboard and exported it as the image shown below. 
    Day 13 was very quiet. It was essentially just Ben and me in the office since most people chose to either take the day off or work from home. Back in Week 1, I have previously written about how Ben had asked me to put together some "roll-ups" (like count by condition, average price by region, etc.) using RV Trader in Microsoft Excel. On Day 13, Ben wanted me to figure out how to carry out some of the tasks that he had originally asked me to do in Excel but to now do them in Python. By the end of the day, I was able to output average price, total price, count by state, average price by state, maximum price by state, and minimum price by state for the weeks of 5-1 and 5-8. This felt like my greatest accomplishment ever, considering my lack of experience in coding. The only request that I was not successful in completing was excluding zeros from the calculation of minimum price by state. I kept getting error messages for no apparent reason (which is probably in the top 5 most frustrating things on this planet), so I will touch base with Alex on Tuesday to see what I was doing wrong.
    Getting close to the home stretch!

The RV Trader dashboard that I made in Tableau on Day 12.

A snip of some of the code I wrote on Day 13.



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