Belgium dbt Meetup #4 (in-person)

The 4th edition of the Belgium dbt Meetup will take place in Mechelen on November 30th.

dbt Meetups are networking events open to all folks working with data! Talks predominantly focus on community members' experience with dbt, however, you'll catch presentations on broader topics such as analytics engineering, data stacks, data ops, modeling, testing, and team structures.

🏠Venue Host: Datashift, Oude Brusselsestraat 14, 2800 Mechelen
🤝Organizers: Cedric Raeymaeckers & Sam Debruyn

To attend, please read the Required Participation Language for In-Person Events with dbt Labs: https://bit.ly/3QIJXFb

Our venue has capacity limits, so please only RSVP if you intend to come and reach out send a message in #local-belgium on Slack if
you need to cancel last minute or change your RSVP status on the Meetup to "Not Going."

Datashift is only an 8-minute walk away from the 🚆 train station. Are you coming by car? 🅿️ Parking Zandpoortvest is a 10-minute walk away.

📝Agenda:

• 17h45: welcome with food & drinks
• 18h40: Behind the scenes: contributing to dbt - Sam Debruyn
• 19h15: A Journey to Data Culture - Thomas Antonakis
• 20h05: Multi-project collaboration with dbt - Charles Verleyen

### Behind the scenes: contributing to dbt-core and its adapters

In this talk, we will go through the inner workings of dbt. How does it do its magic? What better way to learn how dbt works than by contributing to it yourself? We'll dig deeper into how dbt is built and how you can take a look under hood yourself by making your first contributions.

Sam Debruyn - tech lead data & cloud at dataroots
Sam is tech lead of dataroots’s data & cloud unit. He is passionate about data analytics and open-source software. dbt is at the crossroads of where his passions meet. Sam is an early adopter of dbt, the Belgian dbt community leader, top dbt contributor, receiver of the dbt Community Award, and dbt community spotlight member. Short to say, he really seems to know a lot about dbt and is eager to share this knowledge!

### A Journey to Data Culture

Many companies call themselves data-driven and data-first, but most are still gut-driven. At Orfium, we believe a company cannot claim to be any of these fancy terms if there is no proper data culture embedded in all job levels. We do not need just data literacy but a data culture altogether.

In this talk, we will define data culture and how we built it at Orfium. We will also explain how this connects self-service analytics, data cataloging, and data governance initiatives. This talk is beneficial to all data managers, including those who need to unlock time for their teams to do more advanced initiatives rather than spending time fixing formulas on sheets for non-technical departments.

Thomas Antonakis - Principal BI Engineer at Orfium
Experienced Head of Business Intelligence with demonstrated history of working in the internet industry and team-leading. Skilled in Business Planning, Analysis, Business Intelligence and Data Visualization. Strong Business Intelligence professional with a Master of Science (MSc) focused in Operations Research from Athens University of Economics and Business.

### Multi-project collaboration with dbt

dbt 1.6 will go one step further into making collaboration between different dbt projects a breeze. In this session, myself and a colleague will go over those new dbt features that will help you get the most out of working with different dbt projects while keeping full inter-operability.

Charles Verleyen - Lead architect at Astrafy
I am a 34 years old data engineer and have been working for the last 10 years in different industry before founding my company recently with a focus on providing modern data services. I am passionate about open-source technologies and strive to deliver automated data solutions that can scale.

Aside from my work, I am a sport lover with special dedication for tennis.

➡️ Join the dbt Slack community: https://www.getdbt.com/community/
🤝 For the best Meetup experience, make sure to join the #local-belgium channel in dbt Slack (https://slack.getdbt.com/)!

dbt is a data transformation framework that lets analysts and engineers collaborate using their shared knowledge of SQL. Through the application of software engineering best practices like modularity, version control, testing, and documentation, dbt’s analytics engineering workflow helps teams work more efficiently to produce data the entire organization can trust.

Learn more: https://www.getdbt.com/