Wellington Data Eng meetup, February 2025

Hey all, please join us for our inaugural Wellington Data Eng meetup. Join us for an engaging session filled with exciting discussions and networking opportunities.

Don't miss out—RSVP to secure your spot. A big shout-out to Xero for providing us with the venue and Catering! 🎉
🏠 Location: 19/23 Taranaki Street, Te Aro 6011 · Wellington
🍕 Catering: Clickhouse 😊
💬 Join our Slack Group here: Data Engineers Slack Channel
Schedule:
- 5.30pm: Doors Open
- 6pm: Announcements and Welcome
- 6.10pm: 1st Talk (25 mins + 5 min Q/A)
- 6.40pm: 2nd Talk (25 mins + 5 min Q/A)
- 7.10pm: 3rd Talk (25 mins + 5 min Q/A)
- 7.40pm: Networking
- 8.30pm: Doors Close

Speakers:
🎤 Johnny Mirza, Solutions Architect @ ClickHouse
Talk Title: Introduction to ClickHouse
Talk Summary: Discover the secrets behind ClickHouse's unparalleled efficiency and performance. Johnny will give an overview of different use cases for which global companies are adopting this groundbreaking database to transform data storage and analytics.
Speaker Bio: Johnny Mirza is a Solution Architect with ClickHouse, working with users across APAC. With over 20 years of background in solutions engineering, Johnny has a high level of expertise in integration between both public cloud and on-premise infrastructure, while focussing on service assurance, monitoring platforms, and open-source technologies.

🎤 Peter Hanssens, Founder and Principal Engineer at Cloud Shuttle
Talk Title: Enabling Realtime Analytics for DynamoDB
Talk Summary: Following OpenAI's acquisition and shutdown of Rockset, many organisations are grappling with the challenge of maintaining real-time analytics capabilities for their DynamoDB data. In this session, I'll demonstrate how to build an even better solution using ClickHouse, achieving superior performance. Drawing from real-world implementations, I'll walk you through a modern architecture that not only replaces Rockset but enhances your analytics capabilities. Join me to learn the step-by-step implementation, best practices, and see a demonstration of how you can achieve sub-second query performance while reducing costs.
Speaker Bio: Peter Hanssens is the Founder and Principal Consultant at Cloud Shuttle, with over 15+ years of experience in cloud architecture and data engineering solutions. Specialising in AWS, Peter has helped numerous organisations optimise their data infrastructure while reducing costs. His practical approach to complex technical challenges has made him a sought-after consultant in the ANZ region. Peter is also the Founder of DataEngBytes, Oceania's largest community-driven Data Engineering and ML conference.

🎤 Gordon Chan, Staff Engineer @ Buildkite
Talk Title: Buildkite's early adventure with ClickHouse in Test Analytics
Talk Summary: Follow our team's recent journey adopting ClickHouse to tackle growing analytics challenges in our Test Engine platform. I'll discuss the customer and data challenges that pushed us to explore new solutions, why we chose ClickHouse, and our early experience with the ClickHouse Cloud platform. While we're still in the early stages, I'll share some practical insights from our onboarding process that could benefit teams considering similar paths.
Speaker Bio: Gordon is a Staff Engineer at Buildkite, where he leads technical initiatives for the Test Engine platform which helps engineering teams gain valuable insights into their test suites. He recently contributed to the re-architecture of Test Engine's ingestion system using Apache Kafka and Apache Flink, and is currently working on the platform's evolution with ClickHouse to enable advanced test analytics capabilities.

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

Remember to bring along some great questions! See you all there...