What is a dbt Meetup, anyway?
dbt™ is a SQL-first transformation workflow that lets teams quickly and collaboratively deploy analytics code following software engineering best practices like modularity, portability, CI/CD, and documentation. Now anyone on the data team can safely contribute to production-grade data pipelines.
When dbt Labs asked if we'd be interested in organizing the Boston dbt Meetups, we of course jumped at the opportunity. These Meetups, not unlike the Boston Tableau User Group, are a community-driven event where data analysts, analytics engineers, and data engineers can get together and talk shop. Each Meetup focuses on the impact of dbt in the data community and professional development tools for analytics engineers. Participants discuss data stacks, data operations, data teams, modeling, testing, dashboards, and more.
These events do not feature ANY sponsored presentations from dbt Labs, Cleartelligence, providers of the host venues, or speakers. They exist solely to bring a community of data practitioners together. They're casual and inclusive - meant to be informative, helpful, and laid back.
Boston dbt Meetups - Organized by Cleartelligence, Hosted by Rapid7, Featuring Kasey Mazza & Adam Ribaudo
We recently held our first Meetup, kicking things of March 22 and the Rapid7 Global HQ in Boston. Thank you very much to Will Kuan, Nataliia Maksimova, Sagar Suri, Shrutika Tikar, and the rest of the amazing data engineering team over at Rapid7 for being such fantastic hosts. If you're interested in finding out how a global computer and network security firm is using dbt in their tech stack, come see Will's presentation at our Q2 offering being held on June 14!
About 75 people came out to see presentations by Kasey Mazza, Analytics Engineering Manager, RevOps, HubSpot and Adam Ribaudo, VP of Data Activation, Velir.
Adam's presentation, "How to Build Reports from Raw Google Analytics 4 Data using dbt," gave an inside look at some of the data challenges surrounding Google's upcoming transition away from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4.
Universal Analytics, commonly referred to as Google Analytics, has been a core marketing tool used to measure a website's performance for nearly the last 20 years. But, after launching in 2005, it's being sunset this July. Understandably, this has caused a scramble in the marketing community to understand the key differences in the platforms, migrate their websites over, and stand up any additional analytics infrastructure (Big Query exports, advanced analytics programs, etc.)
Can dbt help with this? IT SURE CAN! Take a look at Adam's presentation explaining how his team is using dbt Core and dbt Cloud with their clients to tackle this paradigm shift. You can also download the complete pdf here.
Kasey Mazza gave her talk on "Learning to Love dbt." Yes, it's true. Kasey wasn't always a dbt true believer. In her talk, she discussed how she learned to love dbt through her implementation experience at HubSpot.
The audience asked amazing questions, enjoyed some awesome catering from Regina's, hung out with friends and colleagues for a bit, and our first Boston dbt Meetup was in the books.
If you'd be interested in hosting or presenting at a future Meetup, please don't hesitate to reach out to me or Chitra Sundaram. The community response to these events has been amazing! We already have enough speaker interest to consider adding additional offerings on top of our current quarterly cadence. If it's your first time speaking, do not worry! Our team will help you with your topic and content and support you along the way. We’re committed to building an inclusive community and are looking forward to elevating diverse perspectives, people, and backgrounds regardless of race, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion or disability.
How to Get More Involved in the dbt Community
➡️ Join the dbt Slack community: https://www.getdbt.com/community/
🤝🏽 Be part of the conversation in the #local-boston channel in dbt Slack! This is where the chat will also take place during meetups.
We'll see you at the June 14th Meetup - hosted by Upsolver. Upsolver is a closely-knit group of data engineers and infrastructure developers who are obsessed with making data pipelines so easy to create that any data practitioner could do it, even when dealing with streaming and complex data and big data scale. We built the first version of Upsolver for our own use, and enjoyed eating our own dog food so much that we decided to bring this value to every company doing analytics in the cloud.