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84 changes: 84 additions & 0 deletions website/docs/community/spotlight/alison-stanton.md
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---
id: alison-stanton
title: Alison Stanton
description: |
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 engineering for SaaS companies. For my last few positions I've been brought in to transition larger, older companies to a modern data platform and ways of thinking.
I am dbt Certified. I attend Coalesce and other dbt events virtually. I speak up in <a href="https://www.getdbt.com/community/join-the-community" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">dbt Slack</a> and on the dbt-core, dbt-redshift, and dbt-sqlserver repositories. dbt Slack is my happy place, especially #advice-for-dbt-power-users. I care a lot about the dbt documentation and dbt doc.
image: /img/community/spotlight/alison.jpg
pronouns: she/her
location: Chicago, IL, USA
jobTitle: AVP, Analytics Engineering Lead
organization: Advocates for SOGIE Data Collection
socialLinks:
- name: LinkedIn
link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alisonstanton/
- name: Github
link: https://github.com/alison985/
dateCreated: 2023-11-07
hide_table_of_contents: true
---

## When did you join the dbt community and in what way has it impacted your career?

I joined the dbt community when I joined an employer in mid-2020. To summarize the important things that dbt has given me: it allowed me to focus on the next set of data challenges instead of staying in toil. Data folks joke that we're plumbers, but we're digital plumbers and that distinction should enable us to be DRY. That means not only writing DRY code like dbt allows, but also having tooling automation to DRY up repetitive tasks like dbt provides.

dbt's existence flipped the experience of data testing on it's head for me. I went from a)years of instigating tech discussions on how to systematize data quality checks and b) building my own SQL tests and design patterns, to having built-in mechanisms for data testing.

dbt and the dbt community materials are assets I can use in order to provide validation for things I have, do, and will say about data. Having outside voices to point to when requesting investment in data up-front - to avoid problems later - is an under-appreciated tool for data leader's toolboxes.

dbt's community has given me access to both a) high-quality, seasoned SMEs in my field to learn from and b) newer folks I can help. Both are gifts that I cherish.

## What dbt community leader do you identify with? How are you looking to grow your leadership in the dbt community?

I want to be when I grow up:

MJ, who was the first person to ever say "data build tool" to me. If I'd listened to her then I could have been part of the dbt community years sooner.

Christine Dixon who presented <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD6IrGtxNAM" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">"Could You Defend Your Data in Court?"</a> at Coalesce 2023. In your entire data career, that is the most important piece of education you'll get.

The dbt community team in general. Hands-down the most important work they do is the dbt Slack community, which gives me and others the accessibility we need to participate. Gwen Windflower (Winnie) for her extraordinary ability to bridge technical nuance with business needs on-the-fly. Dave Connors for being the first voice for "a node is a node is a node". Joel Labes for creating the ability to emoji-react with :sparkles: to post to the #best-of-slack channel. And so on. The decision to foster a space for data instead of just for their product because that enhances their product. The extremely impressive ability to maintain a problem-solving-is-cool, participate-as-you-can, chorus-of-voices, international, not-only-cis-men, and we're-all-in-this-together community.

Other (all?) dbt labs employees who engage with the community, instead of having a false separation with it - like most software companies. Welcoming feedback, listening to it, and actioning or filtering it out (ex. Mirna Wong, account reps). Thinking holistically about the eco-system not just one feature at a time (ex. Anders). Responsiveness and ability to translate diverse items into technical clarity and focused actions (ex. Doug Beatty, the dbt support team). I've been in software and open source and online communities for a long time - these are rare things we should not take for granted.

Josh Devlin for prolificness that demonstrates expertise and dedication to helping.

The maintainers of dbt packages like dbt-utils, dbt-expectations, dbt-date, etc.

Everyone who gets over their fear to ask a question, propose an answer that may not work, or otherwise take a risk by sharing their voice.

I hope I can support my employer and my professional development and my dbt community through the following:
-Elevate dbt understanding of and support for Enterprise-size company use cases through dialogue, requests, and examples.
-Emphasize rigor with defensive coding and comprehensive testing practices.
-Improve the onboarding and up-skilling of dbt engineers through feedback and edits on <a href="/">docs.getdbt.com</a>.
-Contribute to the maintenance of a collaborative and helpful dbt community as the number of dbt practitioners reaches various growth stages and tipping points.
-Engage in dialogue. Providing feedback. Champion developer experience as a priority. Be a good open source citizen on Github.

## What have you learned from community members? What do you hope others can learn from you?

I have learned:

Details on DAG sequencing.
How to make an engineering proposal a community conversation.
The <a href="https://www.getdbt.com/product/semantic-layer" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">dbt semantic layer</a>
.
So many things that are now so engrained in me that I can't remember not knowing them.

I can teach and share about:

Naming new concepts and how to choose those names.
Reproducibility, reconciliation, and audits.
Data ethics.
Demographic questions for sexual orientation and/or gender identity on a form. I'm happy to be your shortcut to the most complicated data and most-engrained tech debt in history.
I also geek out talking about: reusing functionality in creative ways, balancing trade-offs in data schema modeling, dealing with all of an organization's data holistically, tracking instrumentation, and philosophy on prioritization.

The next things on my agenda to learn about:

Successes and failures in data literacy work. The best I've found so far is 1:1 interactions and that doesn't scale.
How to reduce the amount of time running dbt test takes while maintaining coverage.
Data ethics.
The things you think are most important by giving them a :sparkles: emoji reaction in Slack.

## Anything else interesting you want to tell us?

My gratitude to each community member for this community.
10 changes: 5 additions & 5 deletions website/docs/community/spotlight/bruno-de-lima.md
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id: bruno-de-lima
title: Bruno de Lima
description: |
I am an Analytics Engineer and aspiring tech writer coming from an academic engineering background.
Hi all! I'm a Data Engineer, deeply fascinated by the awesomeness dbt. I love talking about dbt, creating content from daily tips to blogposts and engaging with this vibrant community!
I worked at Indicium as an Analytics Engineer for more than a year, having worked with dbt (of course, every day) for transformation; BigQuery, Snowflake, and Databricks as data warehouses; Power BI and Tableau for BI; and Airflow for orchestration.
Started my career at the beginning of 2022 at Indicium as an Analytics Engineer, working with dbt from day 1. By 2023, my path took a global trajectory as I joined phData as a Data Engineer, expanding my experiences and forging connections beyond Brazil. While dbt is at the heart of my expertise, I've also delved into data warehouses such as Snowflake, Databricks, and BigQuery; visualization tools like Power BI and Tableau; and several minor modern data stack tools.
I actively participate in the dbt community, having attended two dbt meetups in Brazil organized by Indicium; writing about dbt-related topics in my Medium and LinkedIn profiles; contributing to the code; and frequently checking dbt Slack and Discourse, helping (and being helped by) other dbt practitioners. If you are a community member, you may have seen me around!
I actively participate in the dbt community, having attended two <a href="https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/florianopolis-dbt-meetup" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">dbt Meetups in Brazil</a> organized by Indicium; writing about dbt-related topics in my Medium and LinkedIn profiles; contributing to the code; and frequently checking <a href="https://www.getdbt.com/community/join-the-community/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">dbt Slack</a> and <a href="https://discourse.getdbt.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Discourse</a>, helping (and being helped by) other dbt practitioners. If you are a community member, you may have seen me around!
image: /img/community/spotlight/bruno-de-lima.jpg
pronouns: he/him
location: Florianópolis, Brazil
Expand All @@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ socialLinks:
link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brunoszdl/
- name: Medium
link: https://medium.com/@bruno.szdl
dateCreated: 2023-03-28
dateCreated: 2023-11-05
hide_table_of_contents: true
---

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Inspired by other members, especially Josh Devlin and Owen Prough, I began answering questions on Slack and Discourse. For questions I couldn't answer, I would try engaging in discussions about possible solutions or provide useful links. I also started posting dbt tips on LinkedIn to help practitioners learn about new features or to refresh their memories about existing ones.

By being more involved in the community, I felt more connected and supported. I received help from other members, and now, I could help others, too. I was happy with this arrangement, but more unexpected surprises came my way. My active participation in Slack, discourse, and LinkedIn opened doors to new connections and career opportunities. I had the pleasure of meeting a lot of incredible people and receiving exciting job offers.
By being more involved in the community, I felt more connected and supported. I received help from other members, and now, I could help others, too. I was happy with this arrangement, but more unexpected surprises came my way. My active participation in Slack, Discourse, and LinkedIn opened doors to new connections and career opportunities. I had the pleasure of meeting a lot of incredible people and receiving exciting job offers, including the one for working at phData.

Thanks to the dbt community, I went from feeling uncertain about my career prospects to having a solid career and being surrounded by incredible people.

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30 changes: 30 additions & 0 deletions website/docs/community/spotlight/dakota-kelley.md
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---
id: dakota-kelley
title: Dakota Kelley
description: |
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 dbt when I was in grad school about 3 years ago. When I began with phData I had a fantastic opportunity to work with dbt. From there I feel in love with the Engineering practices and structure that I always felt were missing from Data Work. Since then, I've been fortunate enough to speak at Coalesce 2022 and at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=414-URZnZVY" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Coalesce 2023</a>. On top of this, I've written numerous blogs about dbt as well.
image: /img/community/spotlight/dakota.jpg
pronouns: he/him
location: Edmond, USA
jobTitle: Solution Architect
companyName: phData
socialLinks:
- name: LinkedIn
link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dakota-kelley/
dateCreated: 2023-11-08
hide_table_of_contents: true
---

## When did you join the dbt community and in what way has it impacted your career?

I <a href="https://www.getdbt.com/community/join-the-community/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">joined the dbt Community</a> not too long after my first working experience. One of my passions is giving back and helping others, and being a part of the community allows me to help others with problems I've tackled before. Along the way it helps me learn new ways and see different methods to solve a wide variety of problems. Every time I interact with the community I've learned something new and that energizes me.

## What dbt community leader do you identify with? How are you looking to grow your leadership in the dbt community?

This is a tough one. I know there are several, but the main qualities I resonate with are from those who dig in and help each other. There are always nuances to others situations, and it's good to dig in together, understand those, and seek a solution. The other quality I look for is someone who is trying to pull others up with them. At the end of the day we should all be striving to make all things better than they were when we arrived, regardless if that's the dbt Community or the local park we visit for rest and relaxation.

## What have you learned from community members? What do you hope others can learn from you?

The thing I hope others take away from me, is to genuinely support others and tackle problems with curiosity. There used to be a time where I was always worried about being wrong, so I wouldn't get too involved. It's okay to be wrong, that's how we learn new ways to handle problems and find new ways to grow. We just all have to be open to learning and trying our best to help and support each other.
6 changes: 3 additions & 3 deletions website/docs/community/spotlight/fabiyi-opeyemi.md
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id: fabiyi-opeyemi
title: Opeyemi Fabiyi
description: |
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. I've also got a background in financial services and supply chain. I'm passionate about helping organizations to become data-driven and I majorly use dbt for data modeling, while the other aspect of the stack is largely dependent on the client infrastructure I'm working for, so I often say I'm tool-agnostic. 😀
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. I've also got a background in financial services and supply chain. I'm passionate about helping organizations to become data-driven and I majorly use dbt for data modeling, while the other aspect of the stack is largely dependent on the client infrastructure I'm working for, so I often say I'm tool-agnostic. 😀
I'm the founder of Nigeria's Young Data Professional Community. I'm also the organizer of the <a href="https://www.meetup.com/lagos-dbt-meetup/" title="Lagos dbt Meetup" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Lagos dbt Meetup</a> which I started, and one of the organizers of the DataFest Africa Conference. I became an active member of the dbt Community in 2021 & <a href="https://coalesce.getdbt.com/blog/how-to-leverage-dbt-community-as-the-first-and-only-data-hire-to-survive" title="spoke at Coalesce 2022" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">spoke at Coalesce 2022</a>.
I'm the founder of Nigeria's Young Data Professional Community. I'm also the organizer of the <a href="https://www.meetup.com/lagos-dbt-meetup/" title="Lagos dbt Meetup" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Lagos dbt Meetup</a> which I started, and one of the organizers of the DataFest Africa Conference. I became an active member of the dbt Community in 2021 & <a href="https://coalesce.getdbt.com/blog/how-to-leverage-dbt-community-as-the-first-and-only-data-hire-to-survive" title="spoke at Coalesce 2022" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">spoke at Coalesce 2022</a>.
image: /img/community/spotlight/fabiyi-opeyemi.jpg
pronouns: he/him
location: Lagos, Nigeria
Expand All @@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ socialLinks:
link: https://twitter.com/Opiano_1
- name: LinkedIn
link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/opeyemifabiyi/
dateCreated: 2023-07-02
dateCreated: 2023-11-06
hide_table_of_contents: true
---

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13 changes: 8 additions & 5 deletions website/docs/community/spotlight/josh-devlin.md
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id: josh-devlin
title: Josh Devlin
description: |
After "discovering" dbt in early 2020, I <a href="https://www.getdbt.com/community/join-the-community/?utm_medium=internal&utm_source=docs&utm_campaign=q3-2024_dbt-spotlight_aw&utm_content=____&utm_term=all___" title="joined the community" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">joined the community</a> and used it as a learning tool while I tried to get dbt introduced at my company. By helping others, I learned about common pitfalls, best practices, and the breadth of the tool. When it came time to implement it months later, I already felt like an expert!
Josh Devlin has a rich history of community involvement and technical expertise in both the dbt and wider analytics communities.
In December 2020 I attended the first virtual Coalesce conference, attending all 4 days across 3 time zones! I found my quirky-nerdy-purple-people, and felt at home.
Discovering dbt in early 2020, he quickly became an integral member of its <a href="https://www.getdbt.com/community/join-the-community" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">community</a>, leveraging the platform as a learning tool and aiding others along their dbt journey. Josh has helped thousands of dbt users with his advice and near-encyclopaedic knowledge of dbt.
3 years later I had the pleasure of presenting at my first <a href="https://www.meetup.com/sydney-dbt-meetup/" title="dbt Meetup in Sydney" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">dbt Meetup in Sydney</a>, and then <a href="https://coalesce.getdbt.com/blog/babies-and-bathwater-is-kimball-still-relevant" title="at the first in-person Coalesce" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">at the first in-person Coalesce</a> in New Orleans. My passion is helping people, and I'm glad that the dbt community gives me a place to do that!
Beyond the online community, he transitioned from being an attendee at the first virtual Coalesce conference in December 2020 to a <a href="https://coalesce.getdbt.com/blog/babies-and-bathwater-is-kimball-still-relevant" title="at the first in-person Coalesce" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">presenter at the first in-person Coalesce event</a> in New Orleans in 2022. He has also contributed to the dbt-core and dbt-snowflake codebases, helping improve the product in the most direct way.
His continuous contributions echo his philosophy of learning through teaching, a principle that has not only enriched the dbt community but also significantly bolstered his proficiency with the tool, making him a valuable community member.
Aside from his technical endeavors, Josh carries a heart for communal growth and an individual's ability to contribute to a larger whole, a trait mirrored in his earlier pursuits as an orchestral musician. His story is a blend of technical acumen, communal involvement, and a nuanced appreciation for the symbiotic relationship between teaching and learning, making him a notable figure in the analytics engineering space.
image: /img/community/spotlight/josh-devlin.jpg
pronouns: he/him
location: Melbourne, Australia (but spent most of the last decade in Houston, USA)
jobTitle: Senior Analytics Engineer
companyName: Canva
organization: ""
socialLinks:
- name: Twitter
link: https://twitter.com/JayPeeDevlin
- name: LinkedIn
link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-devlin/
dateCreated: 2023-06-27
dateCreated: 2023-11-10
hide_table_of_contents: true
---

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