Announcing our new Engineering Blog for research and development

Over the years, Tableau engineers have maintained an internal blog, keeping our growing team of employees up-to-date with information about each other’s research and development projects and sharing progress on product improvements—complete with the knowledge we gain along the way. We’re excited to announce that we’re bringing our developers' voices to the public with Tableau’s brand-new Engineering Blog!

This technical blog is written largely by members of our amazing Development team, with the goal of sparking conversations with engineers and researchers in the field. We will talk about how we build products and reveal the technical thinking behind these innovations. We will also talk about the cool research we are conducting in the business intelligence and data visualization fields (and beyond), linking off to the gory, geeky details that we publish for technical conferences.

Among the first posts, you’ll find a glimpse into the surprisingly complicated and oddly exciting world of parsing date strings. By examining a large corpus of date format strings created by our users, our research scientists found a way to automatically parse a huge variety of different date formats. That posting also introduces our Tableau Tech Whitepaper series where we publish in-depth research beyond what we send to conferences and journals.

We are excited to start this fun experiment, giving you deeper insight into the inner workings of Tableau’s Development team—and why we love working at the company that’s helping people see and understand their data.