2021-01-27 Brighton Data Forum

Welcome to the virtual Brighton Data Forum! We are a socialising, networking, and skill-sharing meetup, bringing together local people and organisations doing great work with data.

From students to thought leaders, we have a range of amazing local talent and organisations doing exciting projects with data. Our goal is to foster a community around all of this activity and encourage productive conversation within it.

The forum covers all topics of data professions, including: analytics, data science, governance, warehousing, privacy & ethics, management, integration, visualisation, etc. We offer a blend of (semi) formal presentations as well as friendly chatter and networking opportunities. Now and for the foreseeable future, this meeting will be conducted remotely via zoom.

This meeting's schedule:

• Alex Kenny, "Adapting our marketing strategy during the pandemic"
• David Kane, "A brief introduction to dbt"
• Rob Bramwell, "When Should You Overpay Your Student Loan? A Monte Carlo Exercise with DBT"

Our first speaker is Alex Kenny, Marketing & Strategy Director for Fletchers Solicitors, a Top 100 law firm specialising in complex personal injury cases and the operators of the "Patient Claim Line", a national Medical Negligence brand. Alex is passionate about the use of data to set and execute marketing strategy which is what he has done for 8 years at Fletchers. Now he leads the firm's Strategy & transformation team. Alex also mentors for Virgin Startup & The Copy Club.

Alex's presentation, "Adapting our marketing strategy during the pandemic", explains how Fletchers Solicitors' marketing strategy, historically built on long-term data and trends, suddenly became obsolete in the Covid pandemic and how they used new data to learn about and react to the changes (e.g. public perception, online vs. TV viewing, last click attribution, lead quality) to quickly return to pre-Covid case numbers.

Our second speaker is our very own forum member, Dr. David Kane, a Freelance Data Scientist/Engineer at David Kane Ltd.

David's presentation, "'A brief introduction to dbt", introduces the audience to the Data Build Tool (dbt) from Fishtown Analytics. It is a command-line program that allows anyone with basic SQL skills to set up, schedule and run a data transformation workflow, for all the transformations needed between the loading of data into a warehouse and analysing it. It builds on simple text file scripts and offers workflow macros, variables, for loops, for autogenerated SQL code, all integrated with version control. When run, dbt draws up data lineage and dependency graphs, runs automated testing, and generates your documentation. If you run any transformation pipelines, you will want this tool in your toolbelt!

Our final speaker is Rob Bramwell, a Senior Analytics Engineer at Rittman Analytics, a specialist data engineering, data strategy and data analytics consultancy working with technologies such as Looker, Stitch, Snowflake, Fivetran and Google Cloud. Rob is passionate about building data pipelines that turbo-charge and solidify his client's data capabilities. Rob was a founding member of CDO Partners, the company that originally launched the Brighton Data Forum in 2018!

In Rob's presentation, "When Should You Overpay Your Student Loan? A Monte Carlo Exercise with dbt" he will build a detailed and realistic student loan calculator as a case study, demonstrating the ability and flexibility of dbt to apply SQL to computations it is not normally used for. If you owe student loans, you will be surprised at his conclusions.

We close the meeting with open discussions from attendees.

We are always open to hearing your data stories. Please contact skarinn@yahoo.com if you are interested in presenting.

Please ensure you have zoom installed and running on your computer or device in advance. At the time, make yourself comfortable, optionally with a drink and a snack at hand, and click the link coordinates.