talk-data.com

Venue: 1 Angel Lane, EC4R 3AB

Please note:

1. 🚨🚨🚨A valid photo ID is required by building security. You MUST use your full real names on your meetup profile, otherwise, you will NOT make it on the guest list! 🚨🚨🚨
2. This event follows the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct, please familiarise yourself with it before the event.

Tickets are assigned through a lottery draw about 1 week before the event.

If your RSVP status says "You're going" you will be able to get in. No further confirmation required. You will NOT need to show your RSVP confirmation when signing in.

If you can no longer make it, please unRSVP as soon as you know so we can assign your place to someone on the waiting list.

Code of Conduct: This event follows the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct, please familiarise yourself with it before the event. Please get in touch with the organisers with any questions or concerns regarding the Code of Conduct.

As always, there'll be free food & drinks, generously provided by our host, Man Group.

Main Talks 1️⃣ Create Self-Serve Data Using This One Weird Trick - Oliver Laslett (Co-Founder & CTO, LightDash)

Are you ready to transform how your business interacts with data? This talk will decode the magic of the Semantic Layer within the "modern data stack." This business-friendly veil over your data empowers effortless discovery and access, using everyday language to breach the wall between data sources and business users. The Semantic Layer can fire up your team collaboration, mining insights from data effortlessly, whilst fortifying data security and governance. Learn to unlock the thrill of self-service reporting, boost productivity, and create a climate of data-informed decisions.

2️⃣ Adventures in Unicode: the str less travelled - Alistair Lynn (Software Engineer, Tiqets)

Python 3's str was a leap forward but not a panacea. Join me to dive into the strange world of unicode, how it can bite you, and what to do about it.

In Python 3 we finally got a Unicode-native str type throughout, and there was much rejoicing. But Unicode is a tricky beast, difficult to tame, and there are still plenty of ways it can bite you if you are not careful. We will look at some of these ways, the eldritch abominations looming in shadowy corners of Python's text; we will discover how the siren-song of seemingly innocuous strings can dash you upon the rocks, the deep peculiarity of the humble flag, and finally come to inner peace and harmony as we understand true grapheme-nature. We will then touch on the deeper mysteries of bidirectional text, and our hearts will turn to despair. It will be a fun time.

Lightning Talks ⚡ ⚡1️⃣ Polars' Craziest Feature: bytecode parsing - Marco Gorelli

There's a lot of buzz around Polars, and people usually talk about lazy execution, Rust, or fast-track algorithms.

But there's one newish feature which hasn't yet been talked about much: bytecode parsing.

When you use apply inefficiently, polars will not only tell you, it'll also advise you on how you could have written your code in a better way. Marco is a volunteer maintainer of polars, and Senior Software Engineer at Quansight Labs. He will give a demo of the feature, and briefly explain how it works.

⚡2️⃣ Set Up Your Own ML Cluster - Marco Ghilardi

Cloud computing is great but it also has its downsides such as high costs and vendor lock-in. Why not setting up a "private cloud" at home with an old PC? We could then perform ML experiments, have our data always available, and much more.

Logistics Doors open at 6.30 pm (get there early as you have to sign-in via building security), talks start at 7 pm, drinks from 9 pm in the bar. We will have reduced capacity for this event but there will be plenty of people to discuss data science questions with!

Please unRSVP in good time if you realise you can't make it. We're limited by building security on the number of attendees, so please free up your place for your fellow community members!

Follow @pydatalondon (https://twitter.com/pydatalondon) for updates and early announcements.

Summary The market for business intelligence has been going through an evolutionary shift in recent years. One of the driving forces for that change has been the rise of analytics engineering powered by dbt. Lightdash has fully embraced that shift by building an entire open source business intelligence framework that is powered by dbt models. In this episode Oliver Laslett describes why dashboards aren’t sufficient for business analytics, how Lightdash promotes the work that you are already doing in your data warehouse modeling with dbt, and how they are focusing on bridging the divide between data teams and business teams and the requirements that they have for data workflows.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Modern Data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days. Datafold helps Data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to start a 30-day trial of Datafold. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Oliver Laslett about Lightdash, an open source business intelligence system powered by your dbt models

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Lightdash is and the story behind it?

What are the main goals of the project? Who are the target users, and how has that profile informed your feature priorities?

Business intelligence is a market that has gone through several generational shifts, with products targeting numerous personas and purposes. What are the capabilities that make Lightdash stand out from the other options? Can you describe how Lightdash is architected?

How have the design and goals of the system changed or evolved since you first began working on it? What have been the most challenging engineering problems that you have dealt with?

How does the approach that you are taking with Lightdash compare to systems such as Transform and Metriql that aim to provide a dedicated metrics layer? Can you describe the workflow for som