Talks

Take chances, make mistakes, and get mesh-y

Earlier this year, dbt Core 1.5 introduced new model governance features including model versions, model contracts, groups, and access, to make it easier to manage the the shape of models, the ownership of models, and access controls determining which upstream models can be leveraged for downstream models. When used well, these features allow analytics engineers to more closely manage their expectations for the data they consume, and manage who their downstream consumers are.

From Overgrown To Thriving: Scaling Your dbt Project Like a Gardener

After taking some inspiration from my last couple of years of work, I decided to put some pen to paper and formalize the lessons I’ve learned about how to scale out dbt projects. In a fortuitous turn of events, I had an opportunity to present these thoughts at MDS Fest 2023.

Here are the slides to my session From “From Overgrown to Thriving: Scaling Tour dbt Project Like a Gardener”, in which I describe how to go about refining and rehabilitating truly massive dbt projects.

Get More Out of Your DAG

This year I had the absolute pleasure to present a workshop at Coalesce 2022 in the heart of New Orleans. Along with Wasila Quader, I presented advanced uses of Jinja and dbt Macros to perform dynamic modeling including: run result storage in a data warehouse, dynamic value lookup in models, and leveraging model metadata in macros.

Python Buffalo: Web Scraping for Good

The topic of the September joint Python Buffalo/Data Science meet-up is data scraping. To finish up our conversation of how we can use python to scrape data from public sources, I presented a short slide deck on the ethics of web scraping. The general thesis is that it very much depends on what you are doing and how you do it, and that in the end we should all strive to be good members of the data community. Presentation.