Emily Riederer: Groundhog Day: Election Edition

🚨 Join us for a fully-virtual event! Zoom link will be provided via meetup messages before the talk. 🚨

Groundhog Day: Election Edition: With five days until the midterms, it's hard to avoid news that's all about the election. This meetup will not provide that relief. Every even-numbered year since 2020, Emily Riederer has rolled up her sleeves and jumped into down ballot campaigns as a "data team-of-one" -- building end-to-end data platforms, pipelines, reports, and automations for busy organizers. Repeating similar projects over different years with different orgs, Emily has confronted many approaches aimed at the same problem. In this talk, we'll explore patterns and antipatterns for building a data stack in a rush with open-source tools such as polars, dlt, dbt, and Google Cloud. Reflecting across the years, we'll see how improvements in open-source tooling have made this easier cycle-over-cycle, how my thinking has evolved on tech debt trade-offs when "fast but flimsy" is more valuable than "enterprise grade... later", and celebrate basic automation and scraping tools that can feel as magical as agentic assistants. Thinking about where to invest in building ideal data infrastructure for urgent and short term use may be equally relevant for anyone working on a medium-term project who's sick of forgetting that their join keys aren't cast to the same data type.