How does dbt #local-taipei get started?

Karen Hsieh

Published in

dbt-local-taipei

6 min readDec 10, 2022

Welcome to join us! 💜 🇹🇼

Hi, We are people who use dbt in Taipei, Taiwan. 🇹🇼

Join dbt Slack Community and find us at the #local-taipei channel.

We focus on dbt but also discuss topics related to data,

Let me quote what dbt states for Meetup:

If you work with data, this group is for you!🤗 We welcome data analysts, scientists, engineers, architects, and more!
We will predominantly focus on people’s experience with dbt, but will also discuss broader topics related to data teams, such as data stacks, data ops, modeling, testing, and team structures.
dbt Meetups are gatherings dedicated to helping you own your analytics engineering workflow. Events will focus on the impact of dbt in the data community and professional development tools for analytics engineers. Expect big-picture conversations related to the data stacks, data operations, data teams, modeling, testing, dashboards, etc.

See that topics shared in Coalesce, from building data pipelines to technical writing.
See the channels in dbt Slack. There are #advice-dbt-for-beginners for a great starting point, channels for almost every tool, e.g., #db-bigquery or #tools-metabase or each function, e.g. #operational-analytics, #industry-marketing. Encourage share! e.g. #i-read-this, #learn-on-demand, #leading-data-teams.

We also hope people get benefits here. #local-taipei’s goal

Serve ourselves. Resolve our problems.
Share experience and compares notes with local-taipei and the entire dbt slack community. Read official & original documents. Don’t limit yourself to Chinese.

We have English speakers at Meetup #7 and Meetup #8. Also co-host a meetup with GDG Cloud Taipei.

local-taipei is created by passionate people

dbt saved my life as a data-hungry person in 2020

I wanted to view data but had a hard conversion with data engineers. I didn’t understand the data enough to close the communication gap. Then I found myself dealing with many 3rd party data, and analyzing in spreadsheets didn’t work for me anymore, so I decided to learn SQL. Fortunately, my CTO, Richard, supported me and introduced me dbt. This is how I get started.

I’ve written about the full story here, Self-service product analytics. Shout out to Richard, I think he is the first person who uses dbt in Taiwan. 💜

I joined dbt slack community to view others’ questions. I was surprised by the prompt response and trust in the community. One time, I found an issue with docs. I struggled for a while, should I raise this issue or not, and how. I saw how others did, so I asked Jeremy. He told me to update it directly. 🤪 I said OK. In fact, I didn’t know how to use GitHub.

It’s about time in 2022

I didn’t have a chance to use dbt after I left Richard’s company in 2021. I missed the time I wrote business login as code, got stuck, and figured out how to write SQL. Until I’ve been asked, “Do you know anyone else using dbt in Taiwan?” in the same week twice. It’s about time.

However, I have never been a moderator before. I do not have a technical background, either. Finding other moderators who are engineers (and using dbt currently 😆) is a good idea. So I search “Taiwan” in the #introduction channel on dbt. I found Allen. (Later, until we met in person, he told me he did the same thing. 😉)

Laurence was one of the people who raised the question, “Anyone else using dbt in Taiwan?” He is the moderator of Clojure Taipei who has experience in doing community!

So we 3, Laurence, Allen, and I applied #loca-taipei channel. It was opened on 2022/1/11. Shout out to Laurence and Allen! 💜

We discussed our goal for this local community. It was normal to think about how to grow and acquire more people. Laurence reminded us that we are here for reason. Since we spend our personal time in this local community, we should be happy doing it. Others, too!

local-taipei Community Goal

服務自己，解決自己的問題 Serve ourselves. Resolve our problems.

鼓勵分享經驗、交流，多看原文，多與整個 dbt community 交流 Share experience and compares notes with local-taipei and the entire dbt slack community. Read official & original documents. Don’t limit yourself to Chinese.

We also have a passion for encouraging people to step out of Taiwan. That’s why we stick to slack only. Though Facebook group is a common practice in many Taiwan communities, joining dbt global slack has a huge benefit. That’s also why translating or creating Chinese content is not our goal. We hope people can read the original, 1st head information!

Up and running by people

OK. Though we have a goal, we didn’t know what to do 🥹. We shared the goal, posted the introduction, and then….. wait. Until Wei-Hao asked a question, and 3 people, Laurence, Ted, and Allen were happy to share. We decided to make it an open sharing instead of a private chat. Shout out to Wei-Hao and Ted! 💜

The first meetup was on 2022/2/19. It was funny that I didn’t know only pro account of Google Meet could record. So I used my phone to do the recording… sorry for the shaking 🤣. Funny thing is, hlb said his team watch it. Shout out to hlb 💜, he supports us a lot! Lead the casual chat after sharing, provide space for the in-person meetup, introduce data people and even add timecode on YouTube video.

After this one, uh…. we didn’t what to do again 😳.

Richard proposed a topic. The second meetup was him sharing Learning From 2X dbt Integration on 2022/5/11. Shout out to Richard again 💜.

And! In the casual chat (39:32) in his sharing, Wei-Hao mentioned Great Expectation is great for data quality. Of course, that is the topic for our 4th meetup. Then things keep coming like this. 🤩 Amazing!

Casual chat is the best!

The most thing I enjoy in meetups is the casual chat 🤗 ! The sharing is great. It is an initiator to attract and encourage people to ask questions and share their experiences and challenges.

We started online sharing because of COVID, therefore the 1st in-person meetup was on Sep, Meetup #5. Shout out to Allen for sharing and hlb for facilitating the chat 💜.

And then the co-host one. Shout out to Max, the moderator of GDG Cloud Taipei, keeps encouraging people to compare notes at the meetup 💜. People interacted and have fun. He also demonstrated a best practice for us.

Keep thriving by people

The speakers in the following meetup were connected by people. It’s human nature that you want to share things with people who resonate and compare notes with you.

That’s why Tom, Katy, and Doris, share their experience 💜💜💜. Their sharing inspires more people. That’s why we keep conversations going.