About
I'm forever indebted to my manager, John Pienaar, who introduced me to both dbt and it's community when I joined his team as an Analytics Engineer at the start of 2022. I often joke about my career before dbt and after dbt. Our stack includes Fivetran, Segment, Airflow and BigQuery to name a few. Prior to that I was a business intelligence consultant for 16 years working at big financial corporates. During this time I've had the opportunity to work in many different roles from front end development to data engineering and data warehouse platform development. The only two constants in my career have been SQL en Ralph Kimball's Dimension Modeling methodology...which probably makes me a bit partial to those.
When did you join the dbt community and in what way has it impacted your career?
I joined the dbt community at the start of 2022 when I joined my current company. Having the community available to me from the start of my dbt career was invaluable not only in helping me get up to speed on dbt quickly but also in making me aware of so many capabilities, optimisations and solutions to problems that others have implemented. The knowledge gained here goes much further than just dbt itself.
What dbt community leader do you identify with? How are you looking to grow your leadership in the dbt community?
It feels almost unfair to single out members where there are so many but people like Dave Connors and Benoit Perigaud really represent what this community is about in my opinion. Prompt, proficient, passionate and polite...all the P's you could want. Someone like Sara Leon also deserves a shoutout for keeping us abreast of the newest developments in dbt and also making us feel even more connected to the community.
As for myself, I would like to make some contributions to dbt's codebase in the future to be able to assist the dbt engineers who have offered so much to us dbt users over the years.
What have you learned from community members? What do you hope others can learn from you?
I learned that community members are incredibly passionate about dbt as well as helping other members by sharing their knowledge and also contributing to dbt itself which is to everyone's benefit ultimately.
I try to help regardless of how "simple" a question may be. Even if it's been asked and answered a thousand times before for that person it's new and potentially a real blocker in their world. I remind myself that we were all new to dbt at some stage and every bit of help along the way got us to where we are now.
Anything else interesting you want to tell us?
I'm hoping to attend my first Coalesce event in Las Vegas later this year.