Who?

Hi, my name is Rudolf!

I am a data analyst in London, United Kingdom. With management experience in Hospitality and a bunch of other skills to boot. I am also a 1/8th of a time a musician.

But data, it's ultimately about data. Let me tell you how.

A general data obsession

As a young boy, I was deeply interested in two distinct categories - car branding and political geography.

I could recall on demand pretty much any country, its capital and its location on the world map. I could also tell pretty much any car's brand and model by seeing the badge. I would read the world atlas (and a dictionary) recreationally.

Why? I don't know, I was a weird kid, let's be honest. But for me, this is an illustration of my general comfort with data. I've always been proud of knowing stuff. The understanding of what to do with it came later.

An appetite for visualisation

I studied Marketing. Retrospectively, my academic writing in the first year was simplistic and lacked substance. But my hyperfocus of the year - infographics and graphic design? I was on it like a car bonnet.

So I made a DataViz blog and finished a few projects.

A timeline of the Cabinet of Ministers of the Latvian Government from its most recent inception in 1990 until 2011 (when I made it)
A map of the train lines in Riga, Latvia (my birth town), influenced by the TfL mapping style developed by Harry Beck.

I also had a YouTube edutainment channel for about two and a half episodes. For this, I learned video editing and After Effects, in addition to my pre-existing music production skills.

But these were more about the visuals. My data scraping was painfully manual and I have practically no written record or research available and saved for these projects, only the final SVGs.

I am really proud of these, but I was still plenty green behind the ears.

The business kind of data, the real stuff - that is still yet to come.

Business intelligence

Lastly, I've spent all of my 20s working in hospitality.

Besides the primary responsibilities of managing teams, budgets and customer experience, I got to flex my data skills.

Once I made a friendly bet with a colleague about who was closing more. I took my Sheets to the proverbial fight and won.

As I became a manager, all those Excel skills turned from vindicating convictions to making scoring tables for my team's customer satisfaction performance and tracking their compliance training.

An assortment of tables I created to support my responsibilities as a manager in a restaurant

Understandably, a management role involves understanding the data of the actual business you're running. This is where I started to really understand what gets me jazzed to spend hours fiddling with software some of my colleagues were wary to touch.

Forward

Now, after all of these years of tangentially flirting with data analysis, I finally figured it out for myself - this is what I love to do.

So I took up Google Data Analysis Certificate and learnt how to do all of these disparate things in a cohesive, professional manner.

As I've finished this chapter of my professional development, I'm looking forward to the next position of growth - within the data realm.

To conclude:

  • I've been data-obsessive since childhood. Knowing things has always been a big passion for me. Even if it wasn't very practicable for the most part.

  • I was willing to spend a lot of time learning vector graphics software to make little compulsive ideas real. (And video editing, web and app programming and others)

  • I have done a good amount of creative Excel work so far. Also, I love when new reporting becomes available. The data has been the most fun part of working as a hospitality manager.

  • Finally, I've pulled everything together, got certified, and here I am!

So if I've been entertaining, take a peek at my current work, or get in touch!