Sydney Data Eng Day at DataEngBytes

🎟️ TICKETS — Before you read any further
Tickets for the Data Engineering Day must be purchased via Ticket Tailor:

• Single day (Data Engineering Day only): $299 AUD
• Both days (Data Engineering Day + AI Engineering Day): $499 AUD

👉 Get your tickets at tickettailor.com/events/dataengbytes

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About the Day
The Data Engineering Day is Day 1 of DataEngBytes Sydney (Tuesday 28 July) — Oceania's largest community-run data engineering conference.
This is a full day dedicated to the craft of data engineering: not the hype, not the vendor roadmaps — the real trade-offs, production war stories, and architectural decisions from practitioners who are building and running data platforms at scale. Two tracks run in parallel across the day, with everyone converging for keynotes in the morning and the Town Hall close in the afternoon.
What's on
The day opens with two keynotes. The first maps the Iceberg catalog wars — Polaris, Glue, Nessie, S3 Tables — and the trade-offs every team building a serious lakehouse needs to understand right now. The second is the ClickHouse keynote on real-time analytics at warehouse scale: how ClickHouse fits the modern stack and when it belongs at the centre of your analytics platform.
From there, two tracks run in parallel across the day covering:

• Data contracts in practice — what enforcing contracts as interfaces, not just documentation, actually looks like in production
• Migrating off Spark — a production Polars story: where it wins, where it doesn't, and the gotchas nobody warns you about
• Kafka to Iceberg — the journey of a record from topic to analytics table, covering schema evolution, exactly-once guarantees, and late-arriving events
• FinOps for data teams — how to instrument, attribute, and act on cloud spend, and why the best optimisations are architectural
• Schema evolution without tears — practical strategies across Iceberg, Avro, Protobuf, and JSON
• Data quality as the AI bottleneck — why years of investment in data quality tooling still hasn't fixed the number one blocker for AI initiatives
• Platform engineering for data — building the internal tooling and abstractions that let teams move fast without creating chaos
• uv: modernising your Python data toolchain — replacing pip, virtualenv, and pyenv with a single Rust binary that's 10–100x faster
• Real-time OLAP in 2026 — a clear decision framework for matching workload characteristics to the right engine
• CDC patterns beyond Debezium — what comes next a decade on from when Debezium commoditised change data capture
• Tearing down the modern data stack — the case for radical simplification, with real numbers from teams that did it
• Data mesh: an honest retrospective — what the pattern actually delivered, where it failed, and what a pragmatic middle path looks like
• Building observable data pipelines with OpenTelemetry — instrumenting pipelines across Airflow, Spark, and query engines

The day closes with a Town Hall — an open, community-run discussion on the topics that matter most to practitioners in the room.
This is a practitioner-led, vendor-neutral event. All talks go through a competitive CFP process and are selected on technical merit. No marketing sessions.

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🎟️ TICKETS
Tickets must be purchased via Ticket Tailor — this Meetup page is for discovery only.

• Single day (Data Engineering Day only): $299 AUD
• Both days (Data Engineering Day + AI Engineering Day): $499 AUD

👉 Get your tickets at tickettailor.com/events/dataengbytes