What dbt community members are building (and shipping!)

Sent 21 Feb 2021

Hi friends,

We recently announced dates for Coalesce 2021 (Dec 6-10), and it may surprise you to know that we’re already dedicating effort to planning the conference. We had a lot of fun (and tackled a lot of first-time challenges) organizing Coalesce — we’d never held a conference before, let alone a fully online, multi-day event! Somehow we pulled it off! (“Somehow” == thanks to our events manager, Fatima.)

This week, we’ve been thinking through our Call for Speakers process — how do we frame the conference so we get topics that feel relevant to the community? How can we ensure a lineup with diverse ideas and representation? How do we review several hundred proposals with our ramshackle team? If you’ve seen a Call for Speakers process that you thought was excellent, I’d love to know about it (just hit reply to this email).

Finally, I’m very excited to share with you that community member, Jillian Corkin, has joined our team as a DevRel Advocate! In addition to writing data rap lyrics, Jillian has worn many data-hats over the last few years: analyst, operations specialist, and product manager. We’re thrilled to have her join our team!

— Claire, dbt Community Manager

From the dbt community #

Questions, ideas, articles, and useful insights from our community. Many of these discussions take part in the dbt Slack group — you can sign up here.

I guess everyone’s New Year’s resolution was to create more content and work on side projects. We love to see it! So much so that we’ve created a new dbt Slack channel, #show-and-tell, for you to share your work.

  • Some really cool tooling being produced in the community:
    • pre-commit-dbt, a tool for ensuring dbt project quality, from Radek Tomsej
    • dbt-ml-preprocessing a package for building feature stored, from James Weakley
    • dbt-artifacts, a package for building models on top of dbt artifacts, from Niall Woodward.
  • Zeeshan Qureshi and Michelle Ark from the Shopify data team were featured on the Data Engineering Podcast, talking about how they use dbt to build their data warehouse.
  • Community member Jonathan Talmi sums this one up better than I can: "Just came across a great article about the modern analytics stack. It was clear and concise, and provides a great overview of the current landscape." This article is great for junior team members or coworkers who want to know exactly what a data team should do. I also hear that the author, Justin Gage, is writing an article about dbt — so keep an eye on technically.dev for that.
  • This is a nice little roundup of public knowledge about how different companies use dbt. Thanks to Simo Tumelius for putting this one together — PRs welcome.
  • This thread saw a number of different community members weighing in on the best way to learn git and the command line — info I wish I had a few years ago.
  • James Densmore, Director of Data Infrastructure at HubSpot, wrote a book on data pipelines. So many books in the data space were written in a time before the modern data stack, and have viewpoints that aren't compatible with the tools that teams in our community use today. This book is written for the data teams of today! Congrats James!

A few things you may have missed from us #

We’ll, we’ve been busy:

  • We released dbt v0.19.0, and we have a pre-release for 0.19.1 (which has a ton of performance improvements). Still using an old version of dbt? UPGRADE TODAY.
  • Last week we held our first ever edition of “Staging: dbt demo day”. We saw some of the latest dbt features in action, and got a peek into the dbt roadmap. If you missed it, you can catch up here.
  • Brooklyn Data Co hosted the NYC dbt Meetup, it’ll be up on our YouTube channel 🔜 (please like and subscribe).
  • We gave live-coding a go! Turns out, it’s really hard 😅. You can catch us building some models and macros here.
  • As mentioned above, we also announced dates for Coalesce 2021 — mark your calendars for Dec 6-10.
  • Are you following the dbt twitter account? You should be! (And if you're wondering — no it’s not me that runs it, there’s no way I could not have produced a tweet this excellent.)

Great companies currently hiring #

  • Multiple roles at Fishtown Analytics! We’re hiring! So much! Hereare all of our open roles — some are global, others are restricted to US-friendly timezones.
  • Product Advocate at Iteratively 📊(global remote): I’m a huge fan of Iteratively’s product and team! If you’re someone who is passionate about product analytics or interested in technical writing (and have a love of advocacy), this role may be just right for you!
  • Analytics Engineer at Trade Coffee ☕(NYC): It’s always fun to see companies we love hiring from the community. As my coworker Grant says, “Being a Trade Coffee subscriber is a taste adventure”. Coffee included as a perk of the role!
  • Senior Analytics Engineer at Faire 🛍(SF, remote-ok): This team isn’t using dbt yet, but they want to hire someone with the experience to direct the rollout! It’s pretty cool to see a company hiring specifically to lead a dbt rollout!
  • Senior Data Analyst at Webflow 💻 (US remote): Webflow is a great product, and I’m a huge fan of the team lead, Allie! That’s two big ticks for this role!
  • Senior Business Intelligence Manager at Drizly 🍻(US remote): In case you didn’t know, we love the team at Drizly. They’re doing incredible things on their data team (check out Emily’s Coalesce presentation), and are extremely generous community members.

Check out the #jobs channel in dbt Slack for more listings (or to add one yourself!)

Upcoming events #

Here’s where community members will be speaking, hosting, or attending.

  • Feb 23: dbt How-to Hour: Deep dive on two new packages, dbt-ml-preprocessing and dbt-expectations.
  • Mar 9: dbt 101: New to the community and trying to figure out what all the fuss is about? Join us for this 101 session.
  • dbt Learn: We’ve just announced a ton of new dates — check out the events page for all the timing details.