Inaugural Adelaide Data Eng meetup

Hey all, please join us for our inaugural Adelaide 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! 🎉
🏠 Location: Synechron
🍕 Catering: Synechron 😊
💬 Join our Slack Group here: Data Engineers Slack Channel

Schedule:
- 5.30pm: Doors Open
- 6.00pm: Announcements and Welcome
- 6.10pm: 1st Talk
- 6.40pm: 2nd Talk
- 7.10pm: Networking
- 7.30pm: Doors Close

Speakers:
🎤 Brad Coles, Senior Data Engineer & Data Engineering Capability Lead @ Synechron
Talk: 18 Months with Microsoft Fabric: Where It Was, Where It Is, and Where It's Going
Summary: Microsoft Fabric divides opinion in the data engineering community, and for good reason. This talk draws on 18 months of hands-on delivery across multiple engagements and independent research across the full surface area of the platform.
No vendor theatre or echo chamber, just an honest account of where Fabric was, where it stands today, and where it's headed, including why everything you build in Fabric right now is either preparing you for what's coming, or building debt against it.
Bio: Brad Coles is Capability Lead for Data Engineering at Synechron, where he leads delivery of enterprise data platforms on Microsoft Fabric. Over the past 18 months he has worked across multiple Fabric engagements — from architecture and delivery to pre-sales — and has spent significant time researching the platform beyond client work, covering cost management, lifecycle management, table maintenance, security, and the emerging Fabric IQ paradigm.
He holds the Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate certification and is the co-founder and organiser of DataEngBytes Adelaide. Outside of work, Brad lives in the Adelaide Hills with his young family and is involved in his local football and cricket clubs.

🎤 Peter Hanssens, Founder & Principal AI Enablement Engineer @ Cloud Shuttle
Talk: The AI Gateway: Your Organisation's Most Underrated Data Source
Summary: Every AI request your organisation makes generates a structured event: timestamp, user ID, model, tokens, cost, latency, cache hit, tool calls.
Most teams are discarding all of it. This talk is about building the data engineering layer around your AI Gateway — turning it from a routing proxy into a competitive analytics asset.
I'll cover the schema you get for free, the five DE problems you have to solve (schema normalisation, pricing enrichment, prompt/response storage tiers, org attribution, volume at scale), the dimensional model that makes it queryable, and what you can answer once the pipeline runs.
Three deep dives: prompt version A/B testing at production scale, cache effectiveness analytics, and agent tool call observability.
Bio: Peter is the founder of Cloud Shuttle, a Sydney-based data and AI engineering consultancy, and the founder of DataEngBytes - ANZ's largest data engineering community conference. He works at the intersection of data engineering and production AI: LLMOps, AI gateways, evaluation pipelines, and the infrastructure that makes AI measurable.

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...