Belgium dbt Meetup #12 (in-person)

The 12th edition of the Belgium dbt Meetup will take place in Louvain-La-Neuve on November 5th.

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 & Catering Provider: IBA Headquarters, Chem. du Cyclotron 3, 1348 Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve
🤝Organizers: Sam Debruyn & Kaan Kizilirmak

To attend, please read the Health and Safety Policy and Terms of Participation: https://www.getdbt.com/legal/health-and-safety-policy

Our venue has capacity limits, so please only RSVP if you intend to come. 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."

📝Agenda:

• 18h00: welcome with food & drinks
• 18h45: start presentations
• 20h15: networking & drinks

🗣️Presentations:

Using dbt to manage your data warehouse
In this twofold session, I'll cover how we've used dbt to bring order in heaps of SQL statements used to manage a datawarehouse. I'd like to share how dbt made our team more efficient and our data warehouse more resilient. Secondly, I'll highlight why dbt enabled a way forward on supporting low-code applications: by leveraging our data warehouse as a backend.
I'll dive into systemic design, application architecture & data modelling. Tools/tech covered will be SQL, Trino, Outsystems, GIT, Airflow and of course dbt!
Expect practical insights, architectural patterns, and lessons learned from a real-world implementation.

by Kobe Thuwis, Data Engineer @ Infofarm
Turning coffee into code ☕
I'm a passionate data engineer who loves diving into technical challenges and building robust, scalable solutions.

From chaos to control - how we scaled dbt for 150 analysts and engineers
Managing dbt for 150 analytics engineers meant evolving from fragmented dbt Core projects to unified standards, migrating to dbt Cloud. We solved security risks and inconsistent practices through standardization and centralized workflows, while maintaining our Airflow orchestration. Challenges remain in balancing governance with analyst autonomy at scale.

by Mathias Lavaert, Principal Data Engineer @ DPG Media
Mathias has a decade of experience working on several data-intensive projects in various roles, ranging from engineer to enterprise data architect. Currently he helps DPG Media to transition to a data mesh architecture as a Principal Data Engineer. Mathias lives on the outskirts of Brussels with his wife. Together they're building a small farm specialized in breeding Herdwick sheep.

Fusion360
Let's explore the capabilities of dbt's brand-new engine: Fusion.
We’ll explore it from different angles, such as performance, functionalities, and how it transforms the developer experience.

by Kaan Kizilirmak, Data Engineer at IBA
A data engineer with an analytical focus. My career trajectory began in mechatronics and automation, transitioned towards cloud data engineering.

We are always looking for speakers!
To submit a session for one of the next meetups, please use our Sessionize page.
Are you in doubt if you're ready to give a talk? Check out dbt Labs's guide on how to deliver a fantastic presentation!

➡️ 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 the standard in data transformation, used by over 40,000 organizations worldwide. 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/