Auckland Data Eng meetup, December 2025

Hey all, please join us for our December Auckland Data Eng meetup. Join us for an engaging session filled with exciting discussions and networking opportunities.

Don't miss out—RSVP to secure your spot. A big shout-out to Cloud Shuttle for providing us with the venue and Catering! 🎉

🏠 Location: GRIDAKL
John Lysaght Building, 101 Pakenham Street West, Wynyard Quarter.
🍕 Catering: Cloud Shuttle 😊
💬 Join our Slack Group here: Data Engineers Slack Channel

Schedule:
- 5.30pm: Doors Open
- 6.00pm: Announcements and Welcome
- 6.10pm: 1st Talk (25 mins + 5 min Q/A)
- 6.40pm: 2nd Talk (25 mins + 5 min Q/A)
- 7.10pm: Networking
- 8.00pm: Doors Close

Speakers:
🎤 Harkanwal Singh, Principal Data Engineer, Auror
Talk Title: Marimo notebooks - a better exploratory experience
Talk Summary: Marimo is a next-gen Python notebook, claiming to "transform data, train models, and run SQL queries with marimo — feels like a next-gen notebook, stored as Git-friendly Python. Seamlessly deploy as scripts, pipelines, inference endpoints, and apps."We use Marimo as our exploratory notebooks and the experience is vastly superior to anything else. From a data engineering perspective, if your data warehouse requires hoops to jump to Git integration, there is something wrong.This talk will be an introduction to using Marimo notebooks for data engineering and then developing code that can translate easily to your data pipelines. We will also look at the internals of Marimo.
Speaker Bio: Harkanwal is passionate about combining the best engineering and data practices to build resilient data platforms. He has previously worked at Les Mills, WoolworthNZ and Westpac. He started his data journey in data journalism and was previously the head of data journalism at the New Zealand Herald.

🎤 Radek Ouhel, Data Engineering Chapter Lead, Westpac NZ
Talk Title: What makes Data Engineering good? Digestible edition.
Talk Summary: We all enjoy different aspects of Data Engineering, but can we clearly explain what we do and why it matters to our colleagues from the Business or other IT Teams? One way to do that is to come up with an accurate enough metaphor. The story of the city of SnackOps does just that - and makes you think about what truly matters with each of the Data Engineering Fundamentals: Ingestion, Transformation, Storage, Processing, Serving, and more.
Speaker Bio: With a tech background as a DBA and MS BI Developer, Radek has always had a passion for bridging the gap between Tech and Data - working on and delivering Insights that provided value to the business. Having worked at Rakon Ltd., Mercury and currently at Westpac, he works to formalise his learnings into an easily digestible framework of standards to help both the Business and Data Engineers maximise value from their data investments.

If you'd like to present at future meetups, please submit your talk here!

Remember to bring along some great questions! See you all there...