In the last month, Factored has hosted two dbt Meetups in Medellin and Bogota. This has created a place where data people working with analytics and engineering challenges can share knowledge and have some fun.
So, what exactly does Factored and dbt Labs do? In this post, we’ll dig more into our missions and how these meetups are providing unique opportunities for data analysts, engineers, and more.
What is Factored?
Factored helps US companies close the gap between highly-skilled analytics, machine learning, and data engineering personnel, and the demand for such talent. Additionally, we expose the best talent in Latin America to challenges and innovative situations with Silicon Valley culture, benefits, and experience.
What are dbt Labs?
dbt Labs was conceived to democratize data transformation inside analytics pipelines and data organizations. It embodies the principles of application development inside the analytics transformation process to allow the data products pipeline to be more lean, efficient, and completely documented. Both Factored and dbt Labs firmly seek to promote best practices and share knowledge among different communities.
What are dbt Meetups?
Together, Factored and dbt Labs have come together to host dbt Meetups, a new space in Colombia for data enthusiasts who want to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in the industry and share their own experiences with the community. These spaces are for the community, by the community, meaning everyone is welcome to participate—whether as an attendee or a speaker.
For the first few meetups, we had four volunteers from Factored share some trends and best practices on data modernization, while also motivating attendees to take the stage at following events.
Medellin
The first event occurred in Medellin on July 27th, 2023. We had a total of 29 attendees, and topics included “How to address a ‘messy’ analytics delivery process with dbt” and “From Sheets to Insights: Unleashing the Modern Data Stack”. These were presented by two of Factored’s outstanding Data Engineers.
In the first talk, the Data Engineer speaker walked us through a fictional scenario of how things are normally done in the workplace and the pain points data people experience because of this. He then introduced the audience to dbt and its functionalities, merging both scenarios and showing how all the problems in the fictional workplace could be fixed by following some dbt best practices.
In the second talk, the next Data Engineer speaker shared a real scenario from a complex and antique transformation pipeline. He walked attendees through the previous state of the analytics pipeline as well as the new version, sharing how dbt was one reason for this improvement.
Bogota
The second event occurred in Bogota on August 10th, 2023. We had a total of 25 attendees, and the topics presented were “What’s coming in the Data Landscape for the next few years?” and “Ownership in Data Transformations”. These were presented by Factored’s outstanding Data Engineer and Analytics Engineer, respectively.
In the first talk, the Data Engineer speaker discussed the evolution of the data stack in the last 20 years, explaining the improvements and challenges at every stage, demonstrating how the universe of data stack has improved in many areas, and highlighting some principal leaders.
In the second talk, the Analytics Engineer speaker showed how the lack of ownership of transformation processes and documentation, and tools for centralizing all of these requirements, makes the everyday life of Analytics teams miserable and organizations lose value as a whole.
The Response
At both events, we saw a lot of participation and engagement from the attendees. There was a common feeling of excitement to meet new people and have some fun after learning some valuable information from these amazing talks.
Our Commitment
We believe these spaces are necessary not just to share knowledge, but more importantly to grow together as a community. Ultimately, we need a place to meet and interact with other people in our tech community so that we can tackle our current challenges and share and create solutions together—especially as the tech landscape changes and evolves. This is why both Factored and dbt Labs are committed to continuing to create these events in the following months.
If you’re interested in being a part of our groups, join and stay connected in the #local-colombia channel in our Slack. You can also become a member in Medellin and Bogota via Meetup. We want to keep growing this community in Colombia, and—if you’re reading this from a different country in LATAM—stay tuned, because hopefully we’ll be making it to your city soon!
