I am happy to announce that we have officially launched tecflix.com earlier today! While our new, young start-up company, its domain, and the trademarks, were being registered a few months ago, we were busy building the new online, self-paced learning platform. Our overriding goal was to make the experience pleasant and conducive to good, focused study time. Our site is free from distractions and hopefully easy on the eye. We wanted it to be light and airy to remove the obstacles that so many web sites throw in our way: no, you will not see an advertisement on this site, or anything flashing or moving, perhaps with the exception of some of our more animated instructors. We wanted the site to feel like you were about to spend some time with a good instructional book, the kind that all geeks tend to enjoy even when relaxing—who has not read some rivetting O’Reilly late in the evening?

Our videos are as long as a proper lecture or a learning session should be: usually 40–50 minutes, but some are much longer. Why? Because this way we can structure the learning of a complex subject into a natural path, so that you don’t have to constantly shuffle around, search and seek or keep pressing continue/next page/forward buttons. It is harder and more expensive to make a good, long session, but the learning outcome is better that way. Of course, you can change the playback speed and you are very welcome to jump to a chapter if something is already familiar, or if your interest lies elsewhere. However, if you don’t, and if you sit back and tune-in, you will get a first class learning experience by those who know how to teach: Alberto, Carmel, Chris, Hugh, Marco, and I, Rafal.

We start with a selection of the content and more will come over the next months and years. We launch with Alberto Ferrari and Marco Russo’s DAX Workshop 2nd Edition, an excellent, in-depth course on the language of Power BI and SSAS Tabular. To that we have added the best of the online training that we used to provide at our parent company, projectbotticelli.com: Chris Webb’s excellent Cubes, MDX and Power BI courses. We have moved here my older course on Data Mining with SQL Server SSAS, an outgoing but highly educational technology, which I will supplement with new content focused on Azure ML and R in SQL Server early next year. Carmel Gunn’s also older, but still to-the-point course on using Excel to get the most out of corporate data that is hiding in OLAP cubes completes the initial list.

Our plans are to add a few more courses every year. They will focus on advanced analytics and data science, with a good bit of no-nonsense, practical machine learning, which I will be recording. I aim them at anyone who needs to use data in more advanced ways that BI tools would allow. I am not focusing on ML researchers, academics, or those who need to code deep learning—there is plenty about that out there, but surprisingly little on the more pragmatic side of data science. I do not shy away from theory or statistics—which I like a lot—but all of my courses have been designed for an information worker, an analyst, an IT professional, maybe a BI expert, all who need to get a job done with that little bit of extra magic that statistical learning and data science can offer. I plan to elaborate on that a good bit more over the coming months. I will also record my broader perspectives on what is happening in our industry. I hope my points of view will help you make better IT decisions.

Technology is changing all the time. I am happy to include some of the best in video playback. Our video player uses the newest codecs—if your device supports them—and falls back to the standard ones. Everything has been freshly encoded in new, better resolutions using hand-tuned parameters to ensure the best playback experience with surprisingly low bandwidth requirements. I hope you will like it, and if you don’t for any reason, ping me what we should do better, please. Needless to say, we will continue the work on the platform, adding more learning features. Next in line we have learning progress tracking and self-assessments.

I hope you enjoy your stay and, above all, I hope you learn plenty of new skills, get new perspectives, and form an appreciation not only for the value of data, but also of just how much your work can add to it, without crossing any legal, ethical, or morally questionable lines.

Thank you for your support.

Rafal