About
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-organisers of the Singapore dbt Meetup! My story with dbt started in Jan 2022, when I joined Spenmo where I taught myself dbt, mainly via dbt's documentation and Slack community. We used Snowflake as our data warehouse, and Holistics for BI. I spoke about data self-serve and Spenmo's journey with dbt at multiple meetups.
When did you join the dbt community and in what way has it impacted your career?
I joined the dbt community late January 2022, while setting up Spenmo's first dbt project. I was completely new to dbt, and relied heavily on the #advice-dbt-help channel in dbt Slack whenever I got stuck. I have learnt so much from reading discussions in other channels as well (e.g. #leading-data-teams, #advice-mock-interviews, #db-snowflake, #tools-holistics).
The dbt community also helped me expand my professional network, where I met so many amazing individuals! It all started with #local-singapore which was created by community member Jolanda Zwagemaker sometime in April 2022. We organised dinners to connect with one another, which eventually led to an opportunity to run Singapore dbt Meetup (HUGE thank you to dbt) - it is heartwarming to see connections forged between many attendees of the meetup, where we also learn from one another. It really does feel like a community!
What dbt community leader do you identify with? How are you looking to grow your leadership in the dbt community?
Claire Carroll and Mila Page! My very first touchpoint with dbt was their articles in The Analytics Engineering Guide. I remember relating to it so much that I was saying "YES" to every other line I read, and sending text snippets to my friends.
To me, Analytics Engineering could help overcome certain challenges I face as an analyst, and make the job feels less like a "hamster wheel." As the concept of analytics engineering is fairly new in Singapore, I feel the need to spread the word and bring about a mindset shift among not just data teams, but anyone who needs to work with a data team.
What have you learned from community members? What do you hope others can learn from you?
One of my favourite presentations from the Singapore dbt Meetup was "How would the ideal Semantic Layer look like?" by fellow community member Thanh Dinh from Holistics. It taught me a new perspective on metrics: they could be like dbt models, where dependencies can be set up between metric models.
I definitely have so much more to learn as an individual, but I hope to share some of my tips and lessons in terms of data modelling with others.
Anything else interesting you want to tell us?
Thank you dbt for enabling us to run meetups! It has been critical for ensuring a great experience for the Singapore community. Also a huge shoutout to Amada, the Global Community Development Lead, for always being super helpful and supportive despite the 12-hour time difference!