The Fifth Elephant November 2023 meet-up

Synoposis

dbt is a SQL-first transformation workflow that lets teams quickly and collaboratively deploy analytics code following software engineering best practices like modularity, portability, CI/CD, and documentation. If you work in data or analytics engineering, there is a good chance you’ve heard of dbt over the last couple of years and may have even considered implementing it to manage the analytics code base at your organisation.

In this talk, we will go over some of the lessons I learnt while implementing dbt and building the analytics engineering function at blinkit and Intercom.

Takeaway for the audience

The talk is structured around providing 3 key takeaways to the audience. These are:

1. dbt, the good parts:
   • Reasons that make implementing dbt to manage your analytics code a compelling option.
2. dbt, the bad parts:
   • Things that may get in your way while implementing dbt at your organisation
3. Change management:
   • How to successfully develop an analytics engineering practise in organisations with existing data teams

About Me

I am Pragun Bhutani, and I’ve been working in the field of data variously as a Data Engineer, Analytics Engineer and Data Product Owner since 2015. In this time, I’ve worked at Aircall.io in Paris, at blinkit in India and Intercom in London, UK and at all of these places I’ve had the opportunity to set up the data or analytics engineering teams from scratch.

I’ve worked in both as an individual contributor and a people manager and I equally enjoy both these capacities and their distinct perspectives.

Other than data, I’m also a full stack developer in love with the serverless app development ecosystem.