In last week's post, my first in a series about Airflow, I said that we would be progressing further into this theme. Whilst I have been putting together my thoughts, I feel I need a bit more time to do it justice, and preparing for some of the interactions below is partly why I've been short on time!
Trains (or lack of)
I write this part of the post the night before the inaugural London Data Quality Meetup takes place, at Lyst's office, hosted by my former team there. Thank you so much to Naomi Johnson and the rest of the team at Lyst for providing a great venue for our first Meetup! This is the first of a series of Meetups that I'm organising, sponsored by Metaplane, focusing on Data Quality approaches in Data and Analytics Engineering. This may seem very focused, but general themes of doing Data and Analytics Engineering well will also be covered, as these naturally lead to better Data Quality.
When I first formed the Meetup group, there were a few days when it was just me, a handful of others and the team at Lyst who had signed up for the event. I must admit feeling a bit of imposter syndrome... was anyone else interested in the topic and my Meetup group?
Then suddenly, after a few days, the signups steadily poured in, and we're now at over 150 members and our first Meetup is very oversubscribed (despite a train strike)! We'll look for a larger venue for Meetup #2 in September! Join the Meetup group here.
I'm really excited to hear the presentations from Naomi Johnson (Lead Analytics Engineer at Lyst) and Taylor Brownlow (Head of Product at Count). I'm fairly certain they will be more thoughtful and insightful than my own.
Planes
I will also be speaking at Coalesce 2022 in New Orleans, dbt labs' first in person conference after a couple of fantastic (my favourites) async ones. Register here! This is definitely the conference I'm most excited about this year!
My topic will be on "The Return on Analytics Engineering" - the benefits of properly introducing the Analytics Engineering discipline to an organisation.
In both of these in person instances, I'm really looking forward to meeting people I've only interacted with on Twitter, Slack or LinkedIn. While we've thrived as a community asynchronously, it is also great to meet in real life.
The talks given at the last two dbt conferences were of such high quality that I spent a month afterwards catching up on the ones I had missed. I found it very hard to find a talk I wasn't interested in, which I suppose, as an Analytics Engineer, makes sense, given this is our conference!
So, whether you're coming to New Orleans for the main conference, London, Sydney or Remote... don't miss out!
Zoom Panes
Census are hosting a remote conference at the end of this week called Summer Community Days (with a few in person happy hours, including one in Brooklyn this Friday which still has a few spaces left - sign up here).
I'm speaking on the day 2 keynote panel. Register here for the conference.
This topic is something I've tried to have an impact on during my career. I'm really proud to have played a part in building the Data team at Lyst, which is the only team I've been part of that has achieved a high level of diversity. Diversity, and in particular gender diversity, is a huge problem in Tech, Engineering and Data. There are systemic problems hindering gender parity in our roles and industries that start at grass roots level and go all the way to the top. I'm honoured to be part of a panel on this topic and delighted that it's been given the status of being a keynote.
I'm aiming to continue with my series on Airflow next week!