Brisbane Data Eng meetup, November 2025

Join us for another instalment of the Data Eng meetup in Brisbane! 🌟 Join us for an engaging in-person 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: WeWork, Room 6A, 123 Eagle St, Brisbane
🍕 Catering: CloudShuttle 😊
💬 Join our Slack Group here: Data Engineers Slack Channel

Schedule:
5:30 pm: Doors Open
6:00 pm: Announcements and Welcome
6:10 pm: 1st Talk
6:40 pm: 2nd Talk
7:10 pm: Networking
7:30 pm: Doors Close

Speakers:
🎤 Anup Sethuram, Senior Data Engineer, Foxtel Group
Talk Title: Bookmate: Building an AI assistant.
Talk Summary: I'll be presenting BookMate: an AI-powered book assistant that demonstrates how to build an LLM application from the ground up. We'll explore starting with building a RAG based solution different search strategies and how to evaluate them. I'll show how the Model Context Protocol (MCP) creates clean separation between your LLM and tools, making it more maintainable. We'll dive into the agentic workflow where the LLM autonomously decides which tools to call; whether to search for specific passages, retrieve chapter summaries, or fall back to book summaries when searches fail. The presentation includes a live demo and code walkthrough covering everything from smart chapter detection using regex patterns to distributed tracing for debugging issues. Finally, I'll share my practical lessons on observability, evaluation metrics, and some challenges of building RAG systems and LLM applications.
Speaker Bio: Senior Data-ML-Ops Engineer. Loves exploring how data engineering, ML, and real-time systems come together to power intelligent products. My work blends creative problem-solving with solid engineering, building data platforms, frameworks and applications that scale, self-serve, and drive measurable business outcomes.
Always learning, always shipping.

🎤 Mimoune Djouallah
Talk Title: Life Beyond Pandas: Workflows with DuckDB, Daft, Polars, and Datafusion
Talk Summary: In this talk we will look at four modern data engines: Daft, DuckDB, Polars and DataFusion. They all support some form of out of core execution, letting you work with data larger than memory without moving to a distributed system.They are fast, expressive and very Python friendly, although SQL support can still influence which one fits your workflow.Instead of asking which engine is best, we will focus on recent progress, including a workload that became twice as fast in under a year and how open table formats are bringing cloud warehouse features to local Python workflows.
Speaker Bio: Mimoune "Mim" Djouallah, a former Construction Planner, has been a member of the Microsoft Fabric CAT team since December 2023. Holding a BSc in Civil Engineering, he's been deeply involved with the Power BI stack since 2016. An early adopter of Fabric, Mim actively blogs about Python notebooks, GIS, and various data engines that integrate with Onelake.

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

Together let's kick off our exciting Brisbane Meetup series for 2025. See you there for a night of knowledge and connections. ✨