Welcome. This is the first post on the new Tidelands Analytics site, and it seems fitting to start by saying what this blog is for.
Who this is for
If you work with data — even reluctantly — and you’ve ever thought there has to be a better way to do this, you’re the audience.
That covers a wide range of people: lab managers wrangling spreadsheets, operations leads stitching together reports the night before a meeting, IT folks who inherited a Crystal Reports server nobody documented, and analysts who’d rather be doing analysis than reformatting CSV files for the fifth time this week.
What we’ll write about
A few topics we plan to cover regularly:
When Excel stops being enough. The signs that a workflow has outgrown spreadsheets — and the practical first steps to migrate without breaking everything that already works.
Walkthroughs. Behind-the-scenes looks at how we built specific dashboards, what we’d do differently, and what we learned along the way.
Choosing the right chart for your data. Less of a “here’s a fancy visualization” post and more “here’s why your stacked bar chart is lying to you.”
Statistical control charting in plain English. Why UCL and LCL aren’t the same as specification limits, and what that actually means when something goes out of control.
The R/Shiny ecosystem. Notes on tooling, packages, and patterns we find useful — and ones we’ve tried and abandoned.
Why we’re doing this
Most of our work happens behind NDAs, which means a lot of what we learn never gets shared. The blog is a way to share what we can share — the general principles, the public-data examples, the things we wish someone had explained to us when we were getting started.
If a post here saves you a weekend or two, that’s a good outcome.
Have a topic you’d like us to cover? Send it our way.