Most recently leading a data engineering team at Perpay, Sarah has built and managed data platforms end to end by working closely with internal engineering, product, and operational teams. She recently left her role to pursue a wide variety of endeavors, including writing on her Substack (https://sarahsnewsletter.substack.com/). In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Sarah dives into how configuration-as-code can automate away data work, why you might want to consider adding a data lake to your architecture, and how those looking to build a self-serve data culture can look to self-serve frozen yogurt shops for inspiration. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

Engineering teams leverage the factory coding pattern to write easy-to-read and repeatable code. In this talk, we’ll outline how data engineering teams can do the same with Airflow by separating DAG declarations from business logic, abstracting task declarations from task dependencies, and creating a code architecture that is simple to understand for new team members. This approach will set analytics teams up for success as team and Airflow DAG sizes grow exponentially.