Welcome to our upcoming meetup at Microlab in Eindhoven! We have a lineup of experts ready to unpack two big topics in modern data / analytics engineering: dbt-core and Data Contracts. Learn how the ANWB stood up a full data ecosystem around dbt-core in no time, and find out why data contracts are becoming essential, what they really are, and how to adopt them the right way.
🎤 Henk Pors | We Built a Data Platform Around dbt-core. Here's How
Dbt (data build tool) has quickly become the de facto standard for transforming data inside the modern data warehouse. It lets analytics engineers write transformations in plain SQL, while bringing the discipline of software engineering to the world of data:
- Version control
- Testing
- Documentation
- Modularity
dbt-core, the open-source heart of the project, has sparked entire ecosystems around it, from orchestration to data quality to lineage.
Discover how the ANWB transformed dbt-core from a small-team experiment into an organization-wide standard. A look at the approach, standards, and tooling that made this platform-wide ecosystem possible — and learn which choices, mistakes, and successes accelerated adoption.
🎤 Ruben | Define Once, Trust Everywhere: The what and how of data contracts
For years, data teams have been cleaning up problems downstream that should never have existed in the first place. That's starting to change. By shifting quality and ownership left, closer to where data is actually produced, organizations are beginning to treat data as a real product, with clear owners, expectations, and consumers. But when data breaks, who's responsible? Data contracts shift ownership back to the source, creating a shared agreement between producers and consumers on quality, structure, and reliability. During this talk we will discover how the Open Data Contract Standard and the DataContract CLI make these agreements actionable, testable, and the single source of truth for your entire data stack.
Program
- 17:00 – 18:00 🍕 Food
- 18:00 – 18:10 🎤 Welcome
- 18:10 – 19:00 🎤 Henk Pors | We Built a solid Data Platform Around dbt-core at ANWB. Here's How.
- 19:00 – 19:15 ⏸️ Break
- 19:15 – 20:00 🎤 Ruben van de Donk | Define Once, Trust Everywhere: The what and how of data contracts
- 20:00-21:00 🥤 Drinks
About Henk Pors | Principal data engineer at ANWB
Henk Pors is a Principal Data Engineer at ANWB Hulpverlening, where he is broadly responsible for shaping and evolving the organization’s data platform to best support professionals in their daily work. He focuses on building a sustainable, enterprise‑ready foundation, favoring pragmatic, open‑source solutions that scale across teams and, where possible, across the wider ANWB organization. With a strong interest in the technical side of socio‑technical change, Henk works at the intersection of data engineering, platform strategy, and ways of working. His approach is driven by a clear progression: bringing order to chaos, building robust solutions, and maturing them into reusable platform capabilities. Central to this is the belief that a shared way of working enables teams to move faster together and better support each other across departmental boundaries. Throughout his work, Henk is motivated less by outcomes to showcase and more by a consistent mindset: using technology and data as practical tools to help people ask better questions and arrive at better answers.
About Ruben van de Donk | Principal analytics engineer at Xebia
Ruben is a Principal Analytics Engineer Consultant at Xebia with over a decade of experience in business intelligence and consulting. He thrives on solving data problems by first understanding the business and then changing how they look at data. His core belief: most data problems aren't technical, they're organizational. That's why he bridges analytics engineering with data management, two worlds he sees as inseparable.
