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Community spotlight

The dbt Community is where analytics engineering lives and grows, and you're a part of it! Every quarter we'll be highlighting community members in the dbt Community Spotlight. These are individuals who have gone above and beyond to contribute to the community in a variety of ways. We all see you. We appreciate you. You are awesome.

Community Award Recipient 2024
Christophe Oudar

Christophe Oudar

he/him

I joined the dbt Community in November 2021 after exchanging some issues in Github. I currently work as a staff engineer at a scaleup in the ad tech industry called Teads, which I joined 11 years ago as a new grad. I've been using dbt Core on BigQuery since then. I write about data engineering bo...

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Community Award Recipient 2024
Ruth Onyekwe

Ruth Onyekwe

she/her

I've been working in the world of Data Analytics for over 5 years and have been part of the dbt community for the last 4. With a background in International Business and Digital Marketing, I experienced first hand the need for reliable data to fuel business decisions. This inspired a career move ...

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Community Award Recipient 2024
The Original dbt-athena Maintainers

The Original dbt-athena Maintainers

The original dbt-athena Maintainers is a group of 5 people—Jérémy Guiselin, Mattia, Jesse Dobbelaere, Serhii Dimchenko, and Nicola Corda—who met via dbt Slack in the #db-athena channel, with the aim to make make dbt-athena a production-ready adapter. In the first periods, Winter 2022 and Spring 202...

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Community Award Recipient 2024
Mike Stanley

Mike Stanley

he/him

Mike has been very helpful in dbt Slack, answering questions in channels like #advice-for-dbt-power-users, #advice-dbt-help, #db-bigquery and more. From October 2023 to October 2024, Mike responded to others’ posts 2,355 times. Mike is a truly humble community member who needs no credit or award...

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Community Award Recipient 2024
Meagan Palmer

Meagan Palmer

she/her

I first started using dbt in 2016 or 2017 (I can't remember exactly). Since then, I have moved into data and analytics consulting and have dipped in and out of the dbt Community. Late last year, I started leading dbt Cloud training courses and spending more time in the dbt Slack. In consulting,...

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Community Award Recipient 2024
Bruno de Lima

Bruno de Lima

he/him

Hey all! I was born and raised in Florianopolis, Brazil, and I'm a Senior Data Engineer at phData. I live with my fiancée and I enjoy music, photography, and powerlifting. I started my career in early 2022 at Indicium as an Analytics Engineer, working with dbt from day 1. By 2023, my path took a...

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Community Award Recipient 2024
Opeyemi Fabiyi

Opeyemi Fabiyi

he/him

I’m an Analytics Engineer with Data Culture, a Data Consulting firm where I use dbt regularly to help clients build quality-tested data assets. Before Data Culture, I worked at Cowrywise, one of the leading Fintech companies in Nigeria, where I was a solo data team member, and that was my first ...

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Community Award Recipient 2024
Jenna Jordan

Jenna Jordan

she/her

I am a Senior Data Management Consultant with Analytics8, where I advise clients on dbt best practices (especially regarding dbt Mesh and the various shifts in governance and strategy that come with it). My experiences working within a dbt Mesh architecture and all of the difficulties organizatio...

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Previously on the Spotlight

Mikko Sulonen

Mikko Sulonen

he/him

I've been working with data since 2016. I first started with the on-prem SQL Server S-stack of SSIS, SSAS, SSRS. I did some QlikView and Qlik Sense, and some Power BI. Nowadays, I work mostly with Snowflake, Databricks, Azure, and dbt, of course. While tools and languages have come and gone, SQL ...

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Radovan Bacovic

Radovan Bacovic

he/him

My professional journey and friendship with data started 20 years ago. I've experienced many tools and modalities: from good old RDMS systems and various programming languages like Java and C# in the early days of my career, through private clouds, to MPP databases and multitier architecture. I a...

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Johann de Wet

Johann de Wet

he/him

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....

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Tyler Rouze

Tyler Rouze

he/him

My journey in data started all the way back in college where I studied Industrial Engineering. One of the core topics you learn in this program is mathematical optimization, where we often use data files as inputs to model constraints on these kinds of problems! Since then, I've been a data analy...

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Juan Manuel Perafan

Juan Manuel Perafan

he/him

Born and raised in Colombia! Living in the Netherlands since 2011. I've been working in the realm of analytics since 2017, focusing on Analytics Engineering, dbt, SQL, data governance, and business intelligence (BI). Besides consultancy work, I am very active in the data community. I co-authore...

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Mariah Rogers

Mariah Rogers

she/her

I got my start in the data world helping create a new major and minor in Data Science at my alma mater. I then became a data engineer, learned a ton, and propelled myself into the clean energy sector. Now I do data things at a clean energy company and geek out on solar energy at work and at home!...

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Yasuhisa Yoshida

Yasuhisa Yoshida

he/him

I currently work as a data engineer at a startup called 10X. Specifically, I work with BigQuery to provide data marts for business users. Before using dbt, the queries for creating data marts were overly complex and lengthy, resulting in low data quality. With dbt, we have improved our proces...

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Safiyy Momen

Safiyy Momen

he/him

I've been in the dbt community for ~4 years now. My experience is primarily in leading data teams, previously at a healthcare startup where I migrated the stack. The dbt Community was invaluable during that time. More recently I've built a product, Aero, that helps Snowflake users optimize costs ...

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Community Award Recipient 2023
Josh Devlin

Josh Devlin

he/him

Josh Devlin has a rich history of community involvement and technical expertise in both the dbt and wider analytics communities. Discovering dbt in early 2020, he quickly became an integral member of its community, leveraging the platform as a learning tool and aiding others along their dbt journe...

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Community Award Recipient 2023
Sydney Burns

Sydney Burns

she/her

In 2019, I started as an analytics intern at a healthcare tech startup. I learned about dbt in 2020 and joined the community to self-teach. The following year, I started using dbt professionally as a consultant, and was able to pick up various parts of the stack and dive into different implementations. That experience empowered me to strike a better balance between "best practices" and what suits a specific team best. I also spoke at Coalesce 2022, a highlight of my career! Now, I collaborate with other data professionals at Webflow, where focused on enhancing and scaling our data operations. I strive to share the same enthusias...

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Community Award Recipient 2023
Dakota Kelley

Dakota Kelley

he/him

For the last ~2 years I've worked at phData. Before that I spent 8 years working as a Software Developer in the public sector. Currently I'm a Solution Architect, helping our customers and clients implement dbt on Snowflake, working across multiple cloud providers. I first started reading about ...

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Community Award Recipient 2023
Alison Stanton

Alison Stanton

she/her

I started programming 20+ years ago. I moved from web applications into transforming data and business intelligence reporting because it's both hard and useful. The majority of my career has been in engineering for SaaS companies. For my last few positions I've been brought in to transition large...

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Community Award Recipient 2023
Karen Hsieh

Karen Hsieh

she/her

I’m a Product Manager who builds company-wide data literacy and empowers the product team to create values for people and grow the company. Utilizing dbt, I replaced time-consuming spreadsheets by creating key business metric dashboards that improved data literacy, enabling conversations about p...

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Community Award Recipient 2023
Sam Debruyn

Sam Debruyn

he/him

I have a background of about 10 years in software engineering and moved to data engineering in 2020. Today, I lead dataroots's data & cloud unit on a technical level, allowing me to share knowledge and help multiple teams and customers, while still being hands-on every day. In 2021 and 2022, I di...

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Community Award Recipient 2023
Oliver Cramer

Oliver Cramer

he/him

When I joined Aquila Capital in early 2022, I had the ModernDataStack with SqlDBM, dbt & Snowflake available. During the first half year I joined the dbt community. I have been working in the business intelligence field for many years. In 2006 I founded the first TDWI Roudtable in the DACH region...

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Community Award Recipient 2023
Stacy Lo

Stacy Lo

she/her

I began my career as a data analyst, then transitioned to a few different roles in data and software development. Analytics Engineer is the best title to describe my expertise in data. I’ve been in the dbt Community for almost a year. In April, I shared my experience adopting dbt at the Taipei dbt Meetup,...

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Jing Yu Lim

Jing Yu Lim

she/her

For ~3 years, I was a Product Analyst at Grab, a ride-hailing and food delivery app in Southeast Asia, before taking on an Analytics Engineering role in Spenmo, a B2B Fintech startup. I joined a tech company as an analyst in June 2023, but was recently impacted by a layoff. I'm also one of the co...

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Alan Cruickshank

Alan Cruickshank

he/him

I've been around in the dbt community, especially the London dbt Meetup, since early 2019—around the time that we started using dbt at tails.com. My background is the startup/scaleup space and building data teams in a context where there is a lot of growth going on but there isn't a lot of money around to support that. That's a topic that I've written and spoken about on several occasions on podcasts, blogposts and even at Coalesce 2020 and 2021! Aside from my work at tails.com, my other main focus at the moment is SQLFluff, the open source SQL linter which I started developing as p...

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Faith Lierheimer

Faith Lierheimer

she/her

I've been a dbt Community member for around a year and a half. I come to the data world from teaching and academic research. Working in data fuses the aspects of those careers that I like the most, which are technical problem solving, and helping non-technical audiences understand data and what t...

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Owen Prough

Owen Prough

he/him

Well met, data adventurer! My professional data history is mostly USA healthcare-related (shout out to ANSI X12 claim files) while working with large (10k+ employee) software companies and small (but growing!) startups. My constant companion for the last decade has been SQL of various flavors https://xkcd.com/927/...

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Shinya Takimoto

Shinya Takimoto

he/him

I have about 3 years of dbt experience. I used to be in a large organization where the challenge was to create a quality analysis infrastructure for EC data managed by my department with a limited number of staff. It was then that I learned about dbt and I still remember the shock I felt when I r...

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Anya Prosvetova

Anya Prosvetova

she/her

I’m a Data Engineer with a background in SaaS, consulting, financial services and the creative industries. I help organisations convert data into value, developing data pipelines and automating processes. I’m also a Tableau Visionary and DataDev Ambassador, and one of the organisers of Data + Wom...

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David Effiong

David Effiong

he/him

I started my career as a data analyst but I currently work as a data engineer in a financial Institution. I have experience working in both large organisations and startups. I have been in the dbt community for about 1 year and 6 months. I found out about dbt while working at a startup where I im...

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Emily Riederer

Emily Riederer

she/her

I'm a long-time dbt user and have been an active community member for a few years. Professionally, I've led a variety of data teams at Capital One spanning analytics, modeling, innersource data tools, and data infrastructure. The common denominator of all of these roles has been the overwhelmin...

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