HomeAuthor InterviewsInterview with Paul Houghton

Interview with Paul Houghton

Paul Houghton is the author of Data Engineering with Alteryx. We got the chance to sit down with Paul and find out more about his experience of writing with Packt.

Q: What are your specialist tech area(s)?

Paul: Alteryx, Tableau, Data Analytics and Engineering

Q: How did you become an author for Packt? Tell us about your journey. What was your motivation for writing this book?

Paul: I have been part of the Alteryx community since 2014 teaching, training and leading users groups. When I was approached to write this book I thought it was a fantastic way to share what I have learned through my Alteryx career and help other people to grow their Alteryx use.

Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?

Paul: This book is the cumulation of 8 years as a consultant helping

Q. What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?

Paul: Alteryx has a strong outlook for growth by enabling greater levels of data literacy throughout an organization. With the current shift to the cloud and the development taking place, Alteryx is in a great place to help more people deploy data and gain insights.

Q: Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?

Paul: This book provides an end to end process for getting data sets for your organization’s analysis. If includes the methods for creating the workflows, extracting value and maintaining the data sets as they are deployed to end users. This is the only resource I have seen that provides a framework to for that full process

Q. What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away from the book with?

Paul: Readers should be able to use Alteryx effectively. Understand what the DataOps framework is and how the can use it to build an Alteryx data pipeline and have the skills and knowledge to deploy monitoring systems around your created data sets.

Q. What advice would you give to readers learning tech? Do you have any top tips?

Paul: Get a license and have a go. There are so many different challenges and skill applications that you can apply Alteryx to so trying the tool out will build the knowledge and confidence you need along with the guidance from this book

Q. Do you have a blog that readers can follow?

Paul: databard.co.uk

Q. Can you share any blogs, websites and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning?

Paul: https://community.alteryx.com/

https://www.theinformationlab.co.uk/category/blog/

Q. Do you belong to any tech community groups?

Paul: London Alteryx User Group

You can find Paul‘s book on Amazon by following this link: Please click here.