#dbt meetup - Scaling from 0 to 160 analytics engineers in 12 months

Last Thursday I attended my first #dbt meetup and it was a corker.

The whole event was very well put together - these guys have clearly been running community events for some time. It reminded me a bit of the good old SkillsMatter days!

Anyway the first talk was all about Slim CI and an add on called Spectacles. The whole experience was really well explained and thought out, with options clearly laid out for scaling your dbt projects as they get more complicated.

But the second talk was the humdinger, check this out for a title:

Scaling from zero to 160 Analytics engineers in 12 months

Now this really appeals to me, since it's a situation that is very very interesting.

This talk was headed up by Gordon and @Jason Jones (Can't find Gordon on here!?) and really clearly went through why and how they rolled out #dbt across the combined landscape of VMO2 (Virgin media and O2). Was very interesting to see how they dealt with varying skill levels, and how they sought to empower everyone.

I particularly liked this:

But it's interesting, because on first glance it feels a bit cringey. Once explained though, it's really powerful. And the real crux of the point is this:

Psychological safety is important so that people take risks, which we want because that means innovation

That is HUGE. Really really important.

It also ties in to this, which i came across separately on the same day but i like the synergy:

Done is better than perfect

Sure, this concept has done the rounds many times before, but I particularly like this explanation of it!

Looking forward to the next one! (Also; The new Elizabeth line makes travelling out to canary wharf much easier now, what was once a 45min+ journey is now <15, hurrah!)