Sydney Data Eng meetup, January 2024

Get ready to kick off the year with Data Eng meetup in Sydney! 🌟 Join us for an engaging session filled with exciting discussions and networking opportunities.

🍕🍺 Indulge in pizza and drinks, courtesy of TBC! Don't miss out—RSVP to secure your spot. A big shout-out to AWS for providing us with the venue! 🎉

🏠 Location: AWS Office, Level 8, 2 Market St, Sydney NSW 2000
🍕 Catering: TBC 😊
💬 Join our Slack Group here: Data Engineers Slack Channel

Schedule:
- 5pm: Doors Open
- 5.30pm: Announcements and Welcome
- 5.40pm: 1st Talk Harish Suresh ( 25 min Talk)
- 6.10pm: 2nd Talk Thomas Creuillenet ( 25 min Talk)
- 6.40pm: 3rd Talk Paul Villena ( 25 min Talk)
- 7:10pm: Networking
- 7.30pm: Doors Close

Speakers:
🎤 Harish Suresh, Lead Data Consultant at Mantel Group
Talk: Demystifying Image Generation GenAI models (ft Midjourney v6, Stable Diffusion XL and ComfyUI)
Summary: While ChatGPT has made LLMs extremely accessible to all users, there are still some barriers for Image Generation models, which are rapidly evolving to keep pace. In this talk, I'll be showing you how you can get started with Midjourney even if you don't have any specialised hardware or AI skills (you only need a Discord account) and then take that to the next level using customised node-based workflows using an Open Source project called ComfyUI, running open source models like Stable Diffusion XL on GPU hardware.
Along the way, I'll talk about some the limitations of the models, some risks you should watch out for and share some resources to keep an eye on the rapidly changing space of Diffusion models.
Speaker Bio: Harish is a Lead Data Consultant at Mantel Group, and he is helping clients adopt and drive modern data tools and frameworks to thrive in dynamic and competitive markets.

🎤 Thomas Creuillenet, Data Engineer at Cloud Shuttle
Talk: Mage: transporting your data pipelines to the GenAI era!
Summary: Despite all the innovation SaaS data pipeline companies and claims of the end of the data engineer, our clients are continually seeing the need for data orchestration tooling. It just makes sense that you would have a single place where you can get up and running with a data ingestion and transformation. However, orchestration tools are typically old and clunky, difficult to install, support and maintain and require team upskilling… in short, they are a distraction to the data team.

Enter Mage with it’s code blocks and integration with foundation models to help you build and maintain your data pipelines faster. In this talk, we will showcase how your data team can embrace the GenAI era today!
Speaker Bio: Thomas is Data Engineer at Cloud Shuttle, he is helping customers to bring the best of their data infrastructure. With a background in industrial engineering and working in Toulouse, France, he has built his first data pipelines for the aviation industry using Spark. He has been working as Data and Software engineer at Capgemini where he has extensively experienced Agile development, DevOps and aircraft data processing on the AWS cloud. He is enjoying continuing his journey into the world of data engineering at Cloud Shuttle.

🎤 Paul Villena, Senior Solutions Architect at AWS
Talk: Reinvent Recap - Data and Analytics
Summary: In this session Paul will provide a recap of the latest announcements, and features related to data and analytics on AWS that were covered at 2023 AWS ReInvent. We will cover Amazon Q, a new type of generative AI assistant specifically for work. It can be tailored to your business and is built with security and privacy in mind. We will look at its integration with Amazon Redshift and Amazon Quicksight. We will also dive deeper in the Zero-ETL features that we have announced that simplifies the process of building a modern data platform in AWS. We will also look at how we infused generative AI to Amazon Data Zone to accelerate data governance projects and make data accessible to a broader set of personas across the organisation.
Speaker Bio: Paul Villena is an Analytics Solutions Architect in AWS with expertise in building modern data and analytics solutions to drive business value. He works with customers to help them harness the power of the cloud. His areas of interests are infrastructure-as-code, serverless technologies and coding in Python.

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

Together let's kick off our exciting Sydney Meetup series for 2024. See you there for a night of knowledge and connections. ✨