ο»ΏFiona (00:10)
Welcome back to Undubbed, where we are unscripted, uncensored, and undeniably data. I'm Fiona.
Sarah (00:16)
And I'm Sarah. And if you're new here, this is the show where we get behind the dashboards and into the humans, the craft and the chaos behind the data stories.
Fiona (00:25)
But before we dive in, do all the good data karma things like pump the algos with a like, subscribe, and go ahead and share this episode with your data friends. It genuinely helps more of the community find conversations like this.
Sarah (00:42)
Today we are celebrating 10 years of the Flerlage twins journey together in the Tableau hashtag data fam community. From one early blog post about big data and asking better questions through to Tableau visionary hall of fame status and a library of resources that pretty much every Tableau user has touched at some point.
Fiona (01:06)
Our guests are the infamous Ken and Kevin. They run the Flerlage Twins blog which has over 450 blogs in the archive spanning from 2015 through to 2025. That's actually 451 posts as at December 2025 to be precise.
Sarah (01:28)
Between them, they've got decades in analytics. They're Tableau evangelists and consultants at Moxie Analytics. And they're both long time Tableau visionaries as members of the Tableau visionary hall of fame. Ken inducted in 2023 and Kevin inducted in 2025.
Fiona (01:48)
They are genuine crowd favorites. Two of the most favorite authors, Kevin at number three and Ken at number four. I'm sure there's a bit of family discussion over the Christmas dinner table about that on Tableau Public, regularly packing out Tableau conference sessions, like how to do cool stuff in Tableau and described in community write-ups as having a legion of fans following them around T.C. like Data Rockstars.
Sarah (02:15)
And their work is everywhere. I mean, who hasn't used something from the Beyond Show Me series or grabbed a template when you've desperately needed one? They've also given us DataFam colors.
that game-changing post on transparent color hex code. I know we've used that a few times. And one of my personal favorites, the Tableau chart catalog with over a hundred different chart types. This stuff is just woven into how we all work.
Fiona (02:45)
Well, that was a pretty full intro. Ken, Kevin, welcome to Undubbed.
Kevin Flerlage (02:51)
Thank you for having us, we appreciate it.
Ken Flerlage (02:51)
Yeah, grabbing this.
Fiona (02:53)
with you both working in the Tableau space for so long now, it's really easy to stack up all of those amazing blog posts with over 451. That's a really
incredible outstanding achievement and from the bottom of my heart and I'm sure that many of your Legion of Fans are from the community as well, we're all so grateful for everything that you do and we just really genuinely wanted to say thank you for the amazing 10 years and have a bit of a look back at some of that content and find out a little bit of your secret sauce.
Kevin Flerlage (03:33)
Sounds exciting. Look back. yeah, we've never done that on a podcast before, so cool.
Ken Flerlage (03:34)
I don't know. β
Fiona (03:40)
Awesome. All right, so let's get started with the big picture. When you zoom out over roughly the last decade from Ken's first 2015 blog, the question is the question, right through to both of you sitting here as Hall of Fame visionaries, I'm curious to hear from both of you. Tell us what stands out most about that journey. Are there any inflection points or things where it was like everything changed here?
that come to mind.
Ken Flerlage (04:12)
I mean, I think there's there's a couple of those β you know, I started before Kevin and You know the first blog I wrote It had nothing. I mean most of time Kevin. What's the numbers? There's something like four probably four hundred
Kevin Flerlage (04:28)
You said
451 is what Fi got to tally for us.
Fiona (04:30)
451, yeah.
Ken Flerlage (04:31)
And how many
of them, 95 at least percent of them are very focused on Tableau, right? But when, I first was writing, you know, I worked in analytics before I discovered Tableau and I was first wrote that, you know, first few blogs. I wasn't working with Tableau's, but, but, you know, sort of discovering Tableau. And I talk about this a lot, you know, when, when I've done presentations and written, you you mentioned beyond show me that sort of.
Kevin Flerlage (04:37)
Probably more,
Ken Flerlage (04:58)
realization at one point that this is just this sort of canvas, this palette, with X and Y coordinates and you could sort of build anything in the world. I think that was one of the, one of those big inflection points that was like, okay. I'm in right. This, this is the tool for me. This is the thing I want to keep doing. And that's what kind of led to blood to so much of so many of the blogs, at least for that middle period, somebody that just.
experimental things, all the stuff, the sinkies and anything curvy was all sort of that. that, you know, that was one sort big thing. That's like, Whoa, look at the great things we can do here. and then I the second big one was, me and Kevin, originally Kevin started his own blog and we had Kevin, flarelage.com and Ken flarelage.com and we would get messages saying,
Hey, I think you wrote a blog about this now. No, that's on Kevin's blog and we're just like, why are we doing this? Right? Which so that sort of merging of the blogs into one and just having one place for all of that content I think was another big thing where we and and that was the first time where we sort of just like teamed up as well and You know, and that's been what was that? 2018-19. Yeah And we've kind of teamed up both on the blog as well as work
Fiona (05:53)
Mm.
Kevin Flerlage (06:09)
1919 yep.
Ken Flerlage (06:16)
over that last, β what, almost nine or eight years or so, right? So yeah, I think for me, those are the big points. don't know, Kev if if you anything to add there.
Kevin Flerlage (06:27)
I remember when I first started, the kind of the story was I can had been doing this for a while.
All I did was make fun of him for it, have fun at your nerd conference. I didn't get it. so he's like, you just let me know when you want to learn whatever. so I guess about a year and a half in, Ken became what was then called a Zen Master. I'm like, hey, that's really cool. And then at work, it was.
I was doing this grind it out in Excel analytics. I was looking for my next job. I worked for a huge company and I started looking for their analytics listings and guess what line item was on every single one of them. Tableau, Tableau was, and so, all right, it's time for me to learn. So I
so ken I I text ken I said, all right, think it's time for me to Learn tableau and and ken texts me back β Check out this training session from from matt francis i'm like I have a Tableau zen master identical twin brother and ken wants me to buy a video from Great video for matt francis. I did end up buying it and watching it. But β like why don't you teach me?
But I think it was this really, I mean, I think a lot of people that go from, especially that go from Excel into Tableau go, my gosh, this is, you we were creating chart, we created a bar chart in three seconds, right? It was just so much easier to do, so much more flexible. I hate, I love building charts in Tableau. I hate doing it in Excel, it's very...
Very frustrating. So for me, it was just like, oh my gosh, this is this is amazing. This is easy. And then if I have to talk about anything else, you said hashtag data fam. Have you ever worked with another software package where you had this this group of people that were so willing to help? You could reach, you know, I was two months doing this and sending messages to Jeff Schaefer, who was sending messages back on how to do X, Y, Z. It was like.
this community is so giving and willing to help each other out. Never seen anything like that. So that for me was like, I'm all in. No more calling Tableau Conference a nerd conference. I was 100 % in one of those nerds with everybody else. So yeah. Yeah.
Fiona (08:46)
One of the nerds, yeah, one of us.
You know the thing that stands out to me about what both of you are saying is just the impact that we can have on other people as well. It's a great reminder.
to think about how you can encourage other people and give them that support and cheer them on. And it can really be life-changing.
Sarah (09:13)
Yeah, and I think like my first memory of both of you was really around just the amount of information you were getting out there. Like I always laughed that there wasn't just two of you, there was probably like four or eight of you because the amount of content and the quality in which it was put out. And I think it was you, Kevin, did a visualization. I was just trying to find it, but I couldn't. β
on drunk drivers or something. And I remember looking at that one and just going, it was a visual masterpiece. And it was one of the first times that I'd seen someone really use other tools as well. So look at using, think you were doing it all in PowerPoint at the time, but all the backgrounds and leaning into that, yeah, you still do.
Kevin Flerlage (09:43)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Yeah, in this PowerPoint. Still do, yeah. β
Ken Flerlage (10:00)
Ew.
Kevin Flerlage (10:04)
Yeah, I still do. I do, yeah. I use PowerPoint for all our clients, but we don't do a lot of background stuff. But yeah, I still use PowerPoint. Don't use Fegan or anything like that. Well, thank you. That's very, very kind of you.
Sarah (10:06)
Use what you know.
Yeah, and I want to know, Kevin, do you have a graphic design background at all, or is this just something that comes naturally to you?
Kevin Flerlage (10:27)
No, we've told the story. We have a blog post on design. But we tell the story about when Ken and I were kids, we'll say nine years old, we would sit in our rooms all day. That is long before cell phones and all that, right? We were outside most of the time. But when we were inside, we were drawing. So we would sit there and draw pictures of transformers and.
I would say mad balls, if anybody knows what mad balls are, we're showing our age, but we would just draw all the time. So in that blog post, we have a picture, think, Ken of β Mickey Mouse or something, and me of Pinocchio. And it was just like a passion of ours. So I think we had something we inherited from our father, this artistic ability, but no graphic design.
training or anything like that I think just kind of figured it out over time we did do it both are you know pretty artistic able to draw but that's kind of the extent of it
Ken Flerlage (11:29)
I also think it's a hard skill to teach, but it is definitely learnable. And I, and I, think it's just another, you know, to go back to the community. A lot of the things that we do in, you know, tablet workbooks for for fun are things that we're borrowing from other people. mean, how many times Kev, do you go back and look at something?
Kevin Flerlage (11:50)
Pretty.
Ken Flerlage (11:50)
Kumar created or Ellen Blackburn. Those are the two that popped to my mind immediately. you know, I want particularly when you talk about even Ellen and Pradeep when it's talking about business dashboards, right? Just going and just sort of saying, okay, how did, what did they do here? that looks good. Let's borrow that. Right. So, so much of it is again, just sort of learned from engaging with people that are doing similar stuff and not even just necessarily, you know,
people in the Tableau world, right? mean, go out and just look at Pinterest boards or whatever and get inspiration on these things, right? So I think those are important resources as well when it comes to these design skills.
Kevin Flerlage (12:34)
in a piggyback on that. You touched on it, but you didn't really dig into it is, you know, we both, think, are artistically inclined. And there's a lot of people that aren't, and they show this fear of not being able to become a good designer. Well, obviously dashboard design is totally different than drawing, right? β There's a lot more to it. But when we're talking about aesthetics in general,
This stuff can 100 % be learned. And I've seen people do this. One of my favorite examples is, I mean, and I hope this doesn't offend him anyway. I hope this is a positive thing, but Brian Moore, if you go look at Brian, One of the absolute best out there, you know, perennial β iron viz threat, you know, like he's
really really really good at this stuff. But go look at his Tableau Public Portfolio and when he first started he was a very text-heavy, very little padding, lots of borders. And I think if you look at his Tableau Public Portfolio chronologically you see this huge development in his design skills from
We'll say average. Brian, sorry, I hope this, like I said, doesn't offend you, but average to top five in the world. You know what mean? So this, I think this is possible. So for anybody that that thinks, hey, I'm not artistic. I don't have the graphic design background. You can learn this, you know, just by practicing and emulating what you're seeing from other people. And that's all we did.
I love our community, amazing.
Fiona (14:12)
I think in addition to the amazing design, I also want to acknowledge you guys have a knack of getting into the maths behind things as well. And that's quite unique because people tend to go in one direction, very good at maths, or in another direction, very good at design.
β but having both really, think lends to the amazing designs that come back through. But similarly, Brian Moore that you brought up, we had him recently on the podcast for an Iron Viz review and his latest submission. It's amazing. it's amazing for many reasons, beautiful design, beautiful thoughts around color and how to switch and change through things.
Kevin Flerlage (14:51)
β it's amazing.
Fiona (15:02)
But then he's gone into this incredible thing where instead of designing the background in Figma, he's actually designed it in Tableau and using another sheet as well. So again, a lot of calculations and understanding how that sort of thing goes on. β But it really brings to light and shines a light on, you know, someone who's doing similar things to what you guys have done and bringing the math and the design together.
Kevin Flerlage (15:29)
Yeah, it's weird. were weird. I felt like I was a weird kid. My favorite two classes in school were math and art. you know, I think we always we always talked about how β tableaux is seem like this perfect blend for us. Perfect blend of math and art, the two things we were always the best at and, you know, we in a very nerdy way enjoyed. Right. So. β
Ken Flerlage (15:53)
Yeah. And
it was something that was missing from our, I think our careers before, right? We both had very technical and we definitely use the math, but we were kind of missing that creative side. So, you know, finding, right. Right. Yeah. Except for that. Yeah. Yeah. But finding data, data visualization and sort of opening up, this is, this is math. This is tech. This is also.
Kevin Flerlage (16:07)
Yeah, we haven't done trigonometry since we were in 10th grade, β
Ken Flerlage (16:23)
know, creativity, right? There's no black and white rules on how you do things, right? There's always a bit of nuance and that creativity is just β part of what we love about this space for sure.
Sarah (16:38)
Incredible. mean, turning during Transformers in your bedrooms as young children to trigonometry in 10th grade into what is like a real passion jobs for you both. Amazing. Just... Yeah.
Kevin Flerlage (16:51)
Yeah, cool to be able to do it for a living. I
mean, it took me 40 years to figure out what I wanted to do for a living.
Ken Flerlage (16:57)
Hahaha!
Sarah (16:58)
Ken, almost 10 years ago, you wrote that first blog post, The Question is the Question, where you joked, big data anyone? Hadoop? No SQL? New SQL? Some SQL? Any SQL? And then basically argued that we obsess way too much about the tools and not about the question.
Now we've collectively moved away from big data hype and onto AI hype. Looking at 2026 through the same lens, how can you explain to us how your thinking has evolved?
Ken Flerlage (17:34)
That's a, that's an interesting question. And I will say that, you know, typically we don't talk a lot about AI because it's just not our expertise, right? but I, I still think, you know, so, you know, so many of those technologies that you just mentioned were big things back then 10 years ago, right? But how, when's the last time you heard somebody talking about Hadoop or even the term big data, right?
And, you know, I, and these, you know, technologies always go through these hype cycles and, know, they, they, there are these bits and pieces of that stuff that became real and sort of integrated into everything we do. and, and I do think that AI is sort of similar there, right? we have
particularly all the software companies and marketing and all these kinds of things are talking about this being the solution to every single problem, right? There's just a whole bunch of stuff being thrown at us, AI, AI, AI, AI. And I don't think that, I think some of it is really very real. And I think some of it is just going to sort of disappear. And some of it is just going to kind of flow into our normal business process is going to become a part of.
Every piece of software and we're not even going to really think about it as the separate thing anymore. It's just going to be integrated into our lives. That said, I do think AI is a little bit different, right? You know, in that blog, I talked about asking good questions. I still think that's important, right? We still have to know what questions we're trying to answer. And I think that's part of the problem right now is that we're trying to, we're creating these technologies.
without really a goal of what they're trying to do. At least a lot of people are. β So I think still having a good goal and knowing what the questions are are really important. But there's also things like having good quality data. This is really important for organizations that are trying to embrace AI, is if you don't have good quality data, you're going to have AI making decisions based on bad data, which has always been a problem. So there are so many of these fundamental things we need to do.
from a data quality, data cleanliness standpoint that have always, that have always been there. Right. And quite honestly, a lot of companies don't do a good job of those now have never done a good job of them and going to start implementing AI over top of those. And we're going to start getting these sort of bad decisions. So there are these like core fundamental things. think that we need to be continued to be considered that are, that are fundamental to doing AI. Right.
I do think AI is a little bit different than some of those things because it does feel like it's here to stay then, this goal of having AI that can do anything that a human can do. obviously AI can start.
asking its own questions. So there is this sort of, you know, maybe β AI is starting to be able to answer, doing some of those things that humans could do before. I personally think it's all quite scary, especially when you think about, you know, some of the long-term goals and the amount of money that is being put into these things. think not only scary from a standpoint of, you know, our jobs being replaced,
artificial general intelligence, right? Yeah, I think some of that starts to get into that sort of scary, β you know, world kind of scenario. so I'm definitely concerned about it. But I also think that there is this, you know, there definitely is this component that I think I think it's for sure there's, you know, it's not going away, right?
Kevin Flerlage (21:03)
Truth is, don't think, how could you imagine, we're not really getting in the, you know, kind of the original question, but could you imagine work right now without, I mean, I pretty much just use ChatGPT. Apparently you're like a novice if you only use ChatGPT, it does damn near everything. I mean, I use it at home instead of Google.
Ken Flerlage (21:20)
you
Kevin Flerlage (21:25)
I just pop up and ChatGPT or I ask them to have a question. my gosh, it's amazing that in fact, we stayed kind of close to that. You know what we talked about before is if you look at our views on our website over time, you would think they would go up. They did for a very long time until AI tools started. β
being available. Now, I do know that when somebody asks a question that probably says, well, according to Flerlage twins, this, this, this, this, I hope that it does that. So there's some, I don't need credit. It would be great if ChatGPT gave credit, but you know, but I think it is kind of interesting to see, you know, views going up, up, up, up. And then all of sudden they start not, it's not like this.
drop, but they start to go down and we were kind of curious what that was. And it certainly seems like it is due to do the AI. So admittedly, I don't go to the community. If I have something I can't figure out in Tableau, the first place I go is, is, is a chat GPT and it pretty almost always gets the answer. Right. So, I can't imagine doing work without it, but it is interesting how, you know, Ken says it's scary. Well, we, you know, in
five years, do we have any views on our website? They're seeing that information in a different way, but it's not being tracked as a hit to the site.
Ken Flerlage (22:40)
Right.
Yeah. But the funny thing is that,
you know, it, it, it, it still needs us, right? You know, the chat GPT still needs us and other people that are writing about this stuff and sharing this information because if we stop, right. Then that doesn't have that source information because it can't, at least right now, it can't figure that stuff out. Right. You're talking about getting into this area.
Kevin Flerlage (23:06)
Right now.
Ken Flerlage (23:13)
When it can start, when it can open up Tableau and, and, you know, try a million different things, β to find a solution to a problem, right? But that's when I start getting a little bit scared.
Kevin Flerlage (23:25)
You
Fiona (23:25)
sure. mean, before Christmas, as things were winding up for the year, closing everything out, I listened to a podcast from Stephen Bartlett with his guest, I forget his last name, but his name is Tristan, he used to work for Google was one of the ethicists. And now he runs his own business, a not for profit talking about the dangers of what was social media previously, and now the dangers of AI. And, on the
on the podcast, spoke a lot around the conversations that are public versus the conversations that are private and indicated that they believe that there were about eight people who were really driving AGI ahead. And they believe that there's an sort of 80-20 probability, 80 % it's gonna do good, 20 % it's gonna wipe us all out. Now, I'm not saying that's true by any means, but.
you know, it was kind of one of those moments that Sarah and I sat back and said, β you know, should we be having more of a conversation about this? And Sarah's just arrived back in the office yesterday. And one of the things we talked about was more podcasts that she's been listening to. So we like to hear lots of different opinions. And I think β one of the things that she raised with me was around how do we get better at not just using Chatty G for
productivity, but actually thinking about what else we can do with it. Because both of us agree, we wouldn't have been able to set up our business and do a lot of what we do without the help of ChatGPT. So for instance, with our podcast, we put our show notes through ChatGPT.
and we refine them and we make sure that we're doing things. Now, if we were doing that by self, we would be taking ourselves away from the day job as well. So I think there's heaps of benefits and productivity, but AGI is creepy slash scary.
So your blog archive, we talked about before, over 451 posts. That's pretty wild, guys.
β When you think about it, can you tell us what you've learnt about teaching at scale? What works, what doesn't, and how to decide which topics deserve a full deep dive versus just staying as a quick social media tip.
Kevin Flerlage (26:01)
Hmm, there's a lot there, Ken.
Ken Flerlage (26:03)
Well, yeah,
I mean, I think one thing, you know, there is mentioning is that, you know, people learn in different ways, right? You know, and we've had people, we tend to write, right? And we write and, you know, screenshots and sometimes every once in a while a video, but primarily we write because that's the way we learn, right? You know, I don't want to go watch an hour long video to learn how to do something because I want to be able to skip to the point.
I want to be able to skip down, scan this, scan that, skip to the point, right? And it's hard to do that with video unless there's, transcription or whatever, right? So I prefer learning through text and that's why we write that way, right? We write, rewrite, write to that audience. And, you know, other people don't learn that way. Other people, prefer videos and we have people say, can you do videos? And we're like, well,
We've done a little bit, but it's just not our thing, right? And we refer them to people like Tableau Tim, because he does amazing videos on all these different topics. So I think, I think that's just an important thing to note. I don't know that when we got into this that we...
knew that we were good at teaching. But I remember when I first started doing like the trig stuff, having conversations on Twitter at the time, back when Twitter was β actually used by people. But they were saying, I could never do that.
I could never do that because I don't understand math. that was what inspired Beyond Show Me. It like, no, it's not super, super complicated. It's not easy, but it's not super, super complicated. So the goal was always sort of, how do we take these complex things that, you know, learn trigonometry in high school. It's very abstract.
You never really talk about why you would do these things, right? So the goal is always like, how do we take these abstract things or these complicated topics and make it digestible and easy to understand and applicable to something you actually want to use it for, right? β And I don't know, somewhere along the way, I think we've realized that we are pretty decent at doing that. And then of course, it's turned into...
You know that we've done all that teaching on the blog and you I, I used to answer a lot of questions on the forums and that was a method of teaching. course, now we've, you know, we teach training courses through Moxie analytics as well and those kinds of things.
Kevin Flerlage (28:38)
when somebody says and we've heard this a lot and or feel blessed to be able to do it but β somebody says hey you guys are really great at taking something that's complicated and making it you know and making it simple and easy to understand β so that's that's amazing so i think the other one of your other questions how do we decide on what content that you know kind of makes it or doesn't i mean
Ken Flerlage (28:49)
Hmm
Kevin Flerlage (29:07)
We're trying, we try. Well, we, we used to try and get what three blogs a month. think we're probably more around two a month now, you know, and most of the visiting most of the tableau use we use is at work. So, so much of the stuff just keeps coming up. How we've three, four years ago, we were like, man, we're going to run out of content. And we just never do because there's always challenges. There's always new features. There's always stuff that comes up.
I mean, I know I've got 10 things I would like to write about. One thing I'd love to write about, but it's so niche that like would anybody read about. So I think generally it's it's kind of bouncing the would this be helpful to somebody else or is it just so,
one off that it wouldn't be important. it is interesting how these things just keep coming up and working like, hey, this is how we solve the things. I would say probably 80 or 90 % of the blog posts, at least in the last year or two, are probably from experiences that we had at work.
And we're consultants now, so we get to work with a bunch of different clients with a bunch of different problems So I think that that is like this constant funnel of content, which is pretty cool.
Ken Flerlage (30:19)
Yeah, I mean, if you
look at our blog over the last 10 years, has, the themes have changed a little bit. There was a period there where like every blog was about how to do something crazy. You know what I mean? I built some crazy chart that, you know, there were so many custom charts that I built over the years, know, with curves and things like that. and
Kevin Flerlage (30:30)
Hahaha! β
Ken Flerlage (30:43)
And that was just because that was what I was playing with at the time. And I thought it was cool, right? And, and saw that there could be value and, you know, turning into a template or something like that. Right. β but you know, to Kevin's point over the last couple of years, when we were spending all day, every day working with clients and building business dashboards, you know, almost all of it is very focused on like real life scenario kinds of things.
that can take you, you your dashboard from being good to being like, you know, that extra bit of polish, right? Or solving some complicated problem where typically we'd be saying, well, it's just not possible to do that. Well, here's a way that you can do that. And we try to balance those as well by saying, you know, if we're giving a technique that is a little bit weird or hacky, we try to give you the options of other options, but...
If you can't figure anything else out, here's something that will work. Right. Um, so yeah. And, also that's what tends to drive our Tableau conference content as well. Cause so we've done how to do cool stuff in Tableau since 2020,
So 2022, uh, so the last four years we've done, um, yeah, uh, how to do cool stuff and have a little, it's really just techniques and tips and, and, um, what I probably a hundred percent of those have come pretty close to 90 percent of them come from.
Kevin Flerlage (31:59)
22, that is correct, yeah.
Not 100. Don't ever say 100. I'll give you 99%.
Ken Flerlage (32:18)
our, our, just our work, right? And we're like, it's always fun when you discover something new and call each other and like, Hey, did you know you could do this? And you're always disappointed when he says, yeah, I do that all the time. Every once in a while I was like, no, no, that's cool. You know,
Kevin Flerlage (32:30)
Hahaha!
You know, it's even cooler,
I think it's even cooler when I have one particular client that knows her stuff. And we have a lot of clients that know their stuff, but one particular one, I've learned so much from her. Like she keeps, did you know you could do this? No, this is so cool. I've been using Tableau forever. How do I not know this? So that's a really cool, and yeah, and we've used, we use other people's stuff.
Ken Flerlage (32:51)
Yeah, yeah.
Fiona (32:51)
Yeah.
Ken Flerlage (32:59)
Yeah, yeah.
Sarah (33:01)
Well, I know your presentation from TC25 was the one I think I woke up at some ungodly hour to watch live because I really wanted to kind of be part of the room and excited to say that we will be there for next, for this year. Yeah. So we'll be as close to the front as we can,
Kevin Flerlage (33:15)
I was gonna ask. Yay, awesome.
Ken Flerlage (33:16)
Hey!
Kevin Flerlage (33:22)
I hope that they'll have us back. Sure. Yeah. And we've already got way more silliness coming this year. We built the silly part. We haven't built the presentation. We usually have the presentation built like five months ahead. But we have the opening act built for about a couple months now. So we have got eight months ahead of time.
Fiona (33:45)
Well, I like...
Kevin Flerlage (33:45)
And
Keith may or may not be back.
when we first started doing presentations, I remember my brain going, this has to be fun in some way, shape or form, right? I've seen so many presentations. It just aren't fun. I'm not talking about Tableau people. I'm just talking about just in general. It's like fun is like this so like key element to making people want to be there and want to listen and, be engaged. Right. So, uh, I don't know how it ever got to be what it was. I think it started off.
Was it started off with the ultimate favorites thing with the UFC fighters? Yeah.
Ken Flerlage (34:14)
Yeah, it's definitely
grown and gotten more
Fiona (34:20)
where are you guys hanging out at the moment?
Kevin Flerlage (34:23)
What a tricky question. It stinks that Twitter's is, no longer a thing for our community. You know, we still post blog posts on Twitter and you don't even bother. Well, I do, I get, know, like we used to get, you know, average 70, 80 likes on a blog post posted in a week. And now it'd be like five or six. β it's really.
Ken Flerlage (34:24)
Yeah
You do, I don't even post there anymore.
Kevin Flerlage (34:49)
It's it was such a cool area to chat with people and now I don't think that area really exists I'm I the majority of my time on social media is spent on linkedin It's just it. It just was more like professional posts that are this long. I just that's just not my thing You know, i think twitter was like hey things are short and sweet and we can read them quickly and move on and The conversations they just don't happen
Ken Flerlage (35:03)
Yeah.
And it isn't.
You can have conversations, like real conversations with people. just
doesn't, LinkedIn doesn't, yeah, it doesn't work with that.
Kevin Flerlage (35:18)
I just, yeah, it felt like there was this couple thousand people that were like really hardcore about data viz and tableau on Twitter. And now it's tens of thousands of professionals and some of which are really into it. And others aren't, I just don't, I just don't see that space. β the, I, the, the, β Teblos Slack is, is I see a lot of things going on there.
But there's so many channels and stuff it's a little bit difficult to kind of keep up with what's going on. yeah, so we don't really have a great answer. I wish there was this great place, but LinkedIn is where we spend most of our time and and have most of our
Ken Flerlage (36:03)
And, you know, lot of that is largely just because, you know, of marketing, you know, doing marketing for the company and stuff like that. So a lot of that is, that's driving us to LinkedIn is there. I mean, I think we, yeah, we would love to find that Twitter alternative where we can engage with the community better.
Fiona (36:21)
Mm-mm.
Kevin Flerlage (36:22)
And I know
people are moving to blue sky for a while. I that's just nothing. There's just nothing there. And β that's a post. I still post that. And it's one or two likes on it. So it's a third of Twitter at this point. So it's unfortunate. So LinkedIn, at least it's kind of in one place, I guess, versus spread out. But yeah, it's unfortunate.
Fiona (36:27)
Dead.
Yeah.
It's really the same for us as well. We spend the majority of our time in LinkedIn. One thing you may want to try or consider is as well as doing the blogging on your website, restructuring those blog posts. You need to restructure it because of SEO, but restructuring them as articles. β articles are one of the areas in LinkedIn that you'll get higher
engagement with as well. it might be something to consider, especially if you're finding that the views are sort of stabilizing on the blog site. If you've got both coming through, it may also just help build that following.
Kevin Flerlage (37:15)
So.
Sarah (37:32)
Yeah, and if we do that, quite often it'll be maybe more condensed and then we can always put a link out to the blog for more.
Kevin Flerlage (37:32)
.
I gotcha. Okay.
Sarah (37:43)
Yeah.
Fiona (37:43)
And it's so
Sarah (37:43)
Yeah.
Fiona (37:44)
much better than the posts because you can actually format it. You know, there's a lot of formatting that can go into the articles and it gives you a lot more flexibility.
Cool.
Sarah (37:55)
So
one of the blogs I know a lot of people have bookmarked over the years is the 20 uses for Tableau Level of Detail Calculations, our favorite LODs. It gets referenced a lot. So can you explain to us what you were trying to accomplish with that blog and which one you think had the biggest impact?
Kevin Flerlage (38:16)
Hey Ken, before Ken, that's Ken's blog, but before we talk about that, that is according to Blogger, only our third most popular blog post, which I would expect that to be number one, you mentioned it before Sarah, Data Fam Colors is the number one. And you actually mentioned this one too. Oddly, I have no idea how.
But the transparent color hex code is oddly number two, followed by all of these.
Ken Flerlage (38:48)
Yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kevin Flerlage (38:52)
What's that? You're
responsible for the several hundred thousand views. β
Ken Flerlage (38:57)
Thank you.
Sarah (38:58)
Hahaha
Fiona (38:58)
No, no. Well, so that reminds
me of when you came to JLL and you presented to our team and you were talking about transparency. And I feel like you guys have had so many great ideas over the years. And it was the one thing that I could give back to you was the transparent hex code.
Kevin Flerlage (39:15)
Oh, that's right. That's right. I don't like him. Sorry.
Ken Flerlage (39:15)
Yeah. β
Kevin Flerlage (39:18)
You're right.
You're you're in that blog. Well, it's number two. So thank you. Yes, I'm sorry. I completely forgot that was you're 100 % right.
Ken Flerlage (39:26)
It's
interesting when you look at the Google search results, because we just get a lot of, like people just search for transparent hex code and we end up on that like top 10 list. So somehow along the way, and they're probably going to it and they're like, this is Tableau I don't need that. Although they probably get what they need from using that, right? So yeah, I think that's part of what that's.
Kevin Flerlage (39:45)
Here it is just to make sure
since I.
Kevin Flerlage (39:47)
I forgot it says in the very first paragraph, I was talking about transparent sheets and Fi Gordon mentioned the transparent hex code. What in the big question marks. This of course, piqued my interest and we started digging in. yeah, so feed. So, so let's look at those stats one more time.
So since we talked about that, let's look at our top blog post. Number one, datafam colors written by Ken. Number two, transparent color written by Fi Gordon, Fiona Gordon. I only know her as Fi. I don't know who's this Fiona person. Number two, written by Fi. Okay. Well, now I'm even more confused. Fiona, Fiona Crocker is like not any human I know. So number one by Ken.
Sarah (40:24)
And it's Crocker now, it's Crocker now.
Fiona (40:26)
It's Crocker now, I got married.
It's just so I can
make it into the US.
Kevin Flerlage (40:39)
Okay. right. Number one, DataFam colors by Ken. Number two, Transparent Color by Fi. Number three, LODs by Ken. Number four, If statements by Ken. So yeah, pretty much I'm just a big loser on the blog post front
Fiona (41:01)
Maybe.
Kevin Flerlage (41:01)
Even somebody that didn't
write for our blog post has number two on there. So thank you for that nugget of That may be, maybe.
Fiona (41:05)
Maybe you just get Ken to publish it next time, even when you've written it. Well,
Ken Flerlage (41:10)
I'm sorry, I just put my name on it.
Fiona (41:14)
I mean, you can't be first at everything out of the two of you. If you're more highly rated in terms of the number of favorites on Tableau Public, you can't also be the writer as well.
Kevin Flerlage (41:25)
I want to be there. You see, I'm far more competitive than he is. So I want to.
Ken Flerlage (41:26)
I just want to I just want to say that
when I first started, was such thing as, half of my best work was done before favorites even existed. So it's not really a fair comparison. We could talk about views on Tableau Public if you want at some point.
Kevin Flerlage (41:33)
here we go. Here comes his excuse.
because
you hit on Reddit once? That doesn't count. Because you got a million views on one viz in three days on Reddit, that doesn't count.
Ken Flerlage (41:55)
I'm just saying,
you can make your argument for your measure that you think is the best.
Kevin Flerlage (41:59)
The best
one is favorites on Tableau Public and I got you edged out.
Fiona (42:09)
Why don't you tell us about your favorite posts? Like what's the post that stand out the most for you and describe why they're important to you?
Kevin Flerlage (42:21)
I'll tell you mine, because well, when I first started writing, know, it was on, as Ken mentioned earlier on kevinflourlish.com, was a couple of years after Ken had written anything, had written some stuff and, and it came up with this technique that I didn't even know was really a thing. And it was this, even though it probably isn't hugely popular for work, but it was, β I called it no polygons, where you were able to do some kind of crazy stuff.
And the reason it was really, it was the first post that I wrote that got like some serious action. People started creating visualizations. I would bet hundreds of them, you know, on tablet public off of that. But one thing I remember about it the most, and we talked about Karen Henson, you know, that one person you remember doing that one thing that was important. I remember giving a β comment from Jonathan Drummy, who Jonathan Drummy was like, you know, and still is like.
the godfather of Tableau. and he said, wow, what an easy way to do something really, really, really hard. And like, Jonathan Drummy. Yes. You know, like it was this like big, I think I've only been using Tableau for five or six months at that point. So it was like this big, huge win for me.
And I would say the other thing is when I shared that tab look, you mentioned a couple of times, Sarah, but the Tableau Chart Catalog, that was a lot of work, even though I didn't actually create any of the visualizations in it. It's a lot of work because I got approval from every single author, right? β And I think on Twitter that got like six or 700 likes in a day or two. It was the first time something went, you know, that's not viral when we're talking about, you know.
shoes or something like that but it is viral when you're talking about data viz and tableau but it was like wow this this is actually really important to people and for a while was the second most favorite viz on i've been surpassed it's the third most popular viz most favorited yeah
Ken Flerlage (44:23)
really?
Sarah (44:25)
Well,
fact there, it was my polygon, my no polygon chart that you used on there. So I did read your blog and better than that you selected mine. It was one of the Makeover Mondays, I think that I did.
Kevin Flerlage (44:31)
Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Yeah, I remember
now. Yeah, see, you guys are just, I've forgotten all this stuff, you know, from six, seven, eight years ago. And so, yeah, we're awful. We're all very intertwined. Yes, it is. It was. You were one of the first ones that did it, I think, because I remember being really excited, like, β people actually think this is kind of cool. So awesome. Yay.
Ken Flerlage (44:51)
Hahaha.
Sarah (45:04)
There we go. And what about you, Ken? What's one of your favorite blogs of the past?
Kevin Flerlage (45:06)
Ken, what about you?
Ken Flerlage (45:11)
I mean, maybe the most meaningful ones, you know, to Kevin's point, it's probably the Beyond Show Me ones, I think, because that was probably like the first time I actually started like teaching. I think prior to that, was like sharing something I built, right? So, you know, Beyond Show Me was three different posts. was
post one was about like just the basics of using like X and Y coordinates. Number two was about trig and number three, β wasn't really necessary, but it was about like some more advanced stuff. you know, it was my attempt to take these concepts that were, as we talked about before, that were kind of complicated and that people found scary and try to make it easier to understand. And, I think a lot of people found value out of it and hopefully still do. And so that
Yeah, for me, think. And that was also, though, for me, like, β I kind of am OK about teaching this stuff. And not only that, I actually have some things to share, because I was only maybe a year into using Tableau at that point. β So that's when I think the blog and my blog at that time started to shift from me just sharing some cool things or analyses or whatever to actually just teaching stuff.
β
Kevin Flerlage (46:30)
You have to say like the Sankey stuff is pretty, I mean, that's, if somebody said, know, the Flerlage Twins and then people are like, the Sankey guys, right? Even though it's a Sankey guy singular. β
Ken Flerlage (46:32)
Yeah, I was, yeah.
Yeah, right, yeah.
And,
you know, and that started off with me trying to follow up, you know, it was a blog on Jeff Schaeffer's site written by Olivier, Who had, you know, come up with this idea of using polygons. amazingly, Olivier's like, got to be one of the most brilliant people.
It was like the first thing he ever did in Tableau. And it is a work of art, like the math and all this stuff that he put together to me. It was one of the first things he did in Tableau. So he's a genius, but trying to follow it and just being like, you know, it took me forever to figure out how it actually worked and build all the calculations. And even after I did that, I didn't understand it. And it was like,
Kevin Flerlage (47:09)
Really? didn't know that.
Ken Flerlage (47:31)
You know, I, at that point was pretty skilled in Tableau. think I was probably a visionary by then or Zen master at the time. And, I was like, I just want to make this easier for people and, sort of just turned it into this plug and play template that a lot of people start to use to this day. And then of course, you know, people came, well, can we do with multi levels? Can we do this and that? And, you know, and so it turned into, I think we've probably got, boy.
probably 10 different templates out there. the last thing we did with it was totally, totally start from scratch and rebuild it to correct with this one sort of Keith wall that existed in it. yeah, so I think, I think those Sankey blog posts were definitely another one that kind of got us people to be aware of who we are, who we are and you know, and it's something we're kind of known for.
Kevin Flerlage (48:24)
They're not in our top 20 according to blogger Ken, but I know they're not. But also it's probably because there's like 15 different, the views are spread across like 15 different Sankey blog posts. If you them all up, they'd probably be number one.
Ken Flerlage (48:27)
Yeah, a lot of your stats on those are really out of whack.
Right.
But the other reason it's not as popular a set of posts on there is just, you know, the things that actually are popular are the things that more people need. And these tend to be the things we're writing more of now. The things that are applicable to just about everybody, almost everybody's going to have to learn LODs at some point. You know, one of our top blog posts is if statements, right? Everyone needs to learn how to do if statements if you don't know how to do that, right?
things like pivoting and better ways to do legends and stuff like that are just so, they're just things that just have a much broader audience and things like sankies and other more complex charts, just definitely a smaller audience. So those aren't gonna necessarily appear on the top posts. Yeah, they are fun.
Kevin Flerlage (49:25)
Yeah, but they're
And again, we've come back to it in a really nerdy way. It's fun. It's fun to do trigonometry in your spare time.
Ken Flerlage (49:33)
When there's a purpose for it. Yes. Although I
loved it in 10th grade when I loved Trigonometry.
Kevin Flerlage (49:42)
I don't remember
Fiona (49:43)
One last question guys before we start to wrap up. Looking back across all of the Tableau years, can you tell us your favorite memory of working together? A specific moment where you both walked away thinking, this is why we do this.
Kevin Flerlage (50:03)
Can you think of like one singular moment, Ken?
Ken Flerlage (50:03)
Hmm.
I mean, I remember one moment. remember, β Kev, what year was it? Probably 2019 when, β so the, the Vizzi awards, have, you know, they have this Michael Christiani leadership award and caviwors, you know, you were still kind of new. You're only, you know, a year and a half, two years into it and you won that award. And I remember.
just getting like really choked up and just feeling really proud of you and going and giving you a hug. And that was, you know, it was sort of a special moment. β
So that's one.
Fiona (50:48)
I mean, the Vizies are such an amazing thing for the community to recognize one another. I know that I treasure mine as well. But in the earlier days, before they were so popular, and I think that it definitely, I can understand why that was a special moment for both of you.
Ken Flerlage (50:54)
Yes.
Yeah,
yeah, they really, they really, mean, and they just do such a great job. love the fact that, know, visionaries aren't eligible, right? So it tends to, you tend to, to learn about these people who are doing great stuff that maybe don't have as big a name at that point.
Yeah, so another thing, another memory I think is special is this year doing our presentation at Tableau Conference. β Our session, how to do cool stuff, as I said before, we've done it for four years in a row. Hopefully we'll do it again this year. And it's always been a popular session. We typically do two sessions because there's just not enough space. One year they asked us to do a third session. were like, two's enough.
but this year, I mean, they gave us the keynote stage, β not technically a keynote, a super session, but it was the keynote space. think there was room for, you know, 5,000 people and it was full. And so that, that just felt like, you know, β we've arrived, you know what I mean? It was, and it was, it was so much fun to be able to do it with, you know, my identity, you know, and, and to actually go up there and just, and to do exactly.
We did exactly what we would have done if it was a stage of 100 people, right? The same sort of nonsense and fun and, you know, and we give Tableau so much credit for like allowing us to just do what we wanted to do, right? Just let us be ourselves. So that was definitely a pretty cool moment to be able to share that with Kevin. How about one more? One more. β
Kevin Flerlage (52:47)
Are you gonna put
tears in my eyes three times in a row now or just two? Okay.
Sarah (52:50)
Hahaha
Ken Flerlage (52:50)
No,
The third one is just like us when we said to each other, like, why are we working these like regular jobs? Like, why are we not like doing this as our job and doing it together and us making that decision to do it? And then meeting, you know, we have known Serena Roberts before, but, know, us having those conversations with Serena and her business partner at the time.
and talking through it and just knowing that this was like the perfect fit for us. So that was that sort of joining Moxie, which definitely the best career decision I've ever made. I Kevin would agree with that as well. You know, so that was a super cool moment as well to actually say, yeah, we're working together and we're available. You know, we're available, right?
Kevin Flerlage (53:42)
I don't think I can add to that, so.
Ken Flerlage (53:44)
Yeah.
Sarah (53:47)
Incredible. And I think, you know, like I said, I woke up super early to catch you at TC25. And I would rank it as, in the top three with Debz on stage and I am Biz as the things to watch when you're at Tableau Conference and looking forward to, I hope, seeing it live this year.
Kevin Flerlage (54:00)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank
Ken Flerlage (54:01)
Thank you.
Kevin Flerlage (54:07)
you very much. That's very kind of you.
Fiona (54:10)
Ken, Kevin, thank you both for hanging out with us and for frankly a decade of doing the hard work in public so the rest of us can stand on your shoulders.
Kevin Flerlage (54:22)
Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
Ken Flerlage (54:22)
Our pleasure. Thank you for having us.
Sarah (54:25)
If you love this conversation
as much as we did, don't forget to subscribe, hit follow and leave us a review and share this episode with your fellow Data Fam members.
Fiona (54:36)
We'll include links to the Flerlage Twins blog, their incredible Tableau public profiles, and their socials in the show notes below. I highly recommend going on and spending some quality time on their blog if you haven't already.
Sarah (54:55)
Until next time, keep doing cool stuff with your data, stay curious, and thank you for joining us here on UnDUBBED where we are unscripted, uncensored, and undeniably data. Bye!
