Sources: Swybryd-nation.com & Levtech
After 20 years of guitar playing and rehearsals that sometimes lasted for 6 hours per day, I got to the point where I wanted to stop playing guitar. As a consequence, I rehearsed much less, about an hour per week. This was the reason - in order to improve playing with the standard twitching technique, more and more time had to be invested to see some progress, and given work and family, this became impossible.
About a year and a half ago I accidentally discovered Marshall Harrison on YouTube. He is a guitarist from Texas, who developed a new way/technique of guitar playing. This technique increases the efficiency of twitching by using both the pick and fingers, while improving speed and cleanliness (quality of tones), which is extremely important when playing solo guitar. His technique is called Swybryd picking and it brought me efficiency, quality and optimization in my playing. I was enchanted and fascinated by it so much that, on Sundays, I would attended online lessons with Marshall via Skype, I and bought all his books on the Swybryd picking technique.
Source: pexels.com
It would be 3pm in Houston, evening in Croatia, and I would come to my office with a guitar and amplifier so we could hold online lessons. That’s when I started to exercise for at least an hour every day, and I still do it to this day. The positive effect of the Swybryd picking technique is undeniable - in these year and a half my playing has improved more than in the previous 18 years of practice.
What does guitar playing have to do with Power BI?
Since 2004 I have been working in Excel as the main controlling tool (for reporting and analysis). Almost 90% of time I was copying from one table to another, creating links to other tables, other files, "pulling" formulas, and the smallest part was related to the data analysis itself.
The possibility of error was very high, data security was negligible, and the work was extremely repetitive.
Source: pexels.com
In my department at the company where I was working at the time, when MS Power BI tools were introduced, we decided to test all the functionalities it offers and eventually replaced Excel with it. We used existing knowledge from Excel, upgraded it with Power BI DAX programming language and managed to increase speed, quality and to achieve better visualization in reporting and ad-hoc analyses.
The time we spent on data preparation in Excel, now we used for analysis. The reports, on which we spent hours and days, were now automatically refreshed and available to users on the Power BI portal and mobile devices. We've also improved the security of the reports themselves, determining who can access data and reports through Row Level Security - for example, each sales channel could only see its own sales results, although everyone accessed the same report.
To answer my question, what are the similarities and connections between Swybryd picking guitar playing techniques and Power BI, considering we are talking about two completely different worlds?
They both bring efficiency, quality and optimization of guitar playing/reporting and, for me personally, they both put a smile on my face every single day.