Wellington Data Eng meetup, April 2025

Hey all, please join us for our next 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. Looking for a sponsor for the venue and Catering! 🎉
🏠 Location: Westpac
🍕 Catering: Westpac 😊
💬 Join our Slack Group here: Data Engineers Slack Channel

Schedule:
- 5.00pm: Doors Open
- 5.30pm: Announcements and Welcome
- 5.40pm: 1st Talk (25 mins + 5 min Q/A)
- 6.10pm: 2nd Talk (25 mins + 5 min Q/A)
- 6.40pm: 3rd Talk (25 mins + 5 min Q/A)
- 7.10pm: Networking
- 8.00pm: Doors Close

Speakers:
🎤 Shane Gibson, Agile Data Coach & Co-Founder, AgileData
Talk Title: Your Data Architecture Is Not My Data Architecture: An Open-Source Checklist for a Shared Language
Talk Summary: Layered data architectures have been around for decades, iterating through each of the data technology waves.The latest incarnation, the "Medallion Architecture", with its Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers, has seen renewed conversations around layered data architectures again.This is a good thing.But there’s one big problem. nobody agrees on what belongs in each layer.Data people love to argue about semantics. What you call Silver, I might call Gold. What I define as Gold, you might think belongs in Silver. These inconsistencies create confusion, misalignment, and unnecessary complexity when designing and managing data architectures.This is a bad thing.To solve this, I’ve created an open-source checklist that provides a common language for defining data layers. It doesn’t dictate a single standard, it helps teams map their own architecture to others creating a shared language.In this session I will show the current version of the checklist applied to a number of different data architectures.
Speaker Bio: Shane is known for my practical, no-nonsense approach to solving complex data challenges. With over 30 years of experience, he has dedicated his career to helping organisations design, deliver, and scale their data practices by adopting innovative patterns that simplify how data teams work.Drawing on his experience as a consultant, architect, agile coach, and product manager, he iterates and publishes patterns and pattern templates to bridge the gap between technical data teams and business stakeholders, ensuring alignment in delivering valuable outcomes.

🎤 Tim McNamara Founder, Accelerant.dev
Talk Title: What is Rust and what's it got to do with data engineering?
Talk Summary: Keen to supercharge your data pipelines? This fun, hands-on session introduces the Rust programming language and will show you how it can support your existing data engineering stack to be more robust and easier to deploy, while processing data faster with fewer compute resources.We'll start by introducing Rust for building data transformers—and see that it's possible to get something to run in seconds that takes minutes or more in Python.The next step is integrating Rust within data engineering workflows, from Makefiles to newer tools like Airflow, Mage, Dagster and Prefect.Then we'll discover its secret sauce, deployment. We'll see if we can cross-compiling Rust-based data utilities to run on multiple architectures (x86, ARM, WebAssembly/WASM) without needing to worry about dependencies and installation.Speaker Bio: These days, Tim McNamara's attention is focused primarily on supporting teams to adopt Rust - but his software background is actually from data science, Python, and natural language processing. Tim has worked for large internationals such as Amazon Web Services and Canonical, and also local companies like DOT Loves Data and Dragonfly Data Science.Tim is the founder of a consultancy that assists teams in adopting Rust, a programming language known for its high performance, energy efficiency, reliability, and safety. With experience in Rust since 2017, he published the widely acclaimed book Rust in Action, which introduces the language through various systems programming concepts and techniques. Additionally, he serves as a LinkedIn Learning instructor, creating courses and workshops for learners at all levels. You'll find him online as timClicks on social media. Tim also hosts a YouTube channel and runs a software podcast.His mission is to develop technology products and services that help make sense of our world and enhance people's lives.

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...