Locally Optimistic hosts periodic events focused on data leadership, data tools, and making your team more effective. Locally Optimistic meetups and events are remote and open to all community members.
Add all Locally Optimistic events to your calendar here, or check out upcoming and past events below. Community member Emilie Schario also created a Zap to add any new Locally Optimistic videos to Todoist.
Upcoming Data Leadership Events
- July 20, 2022
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Meetup: Staff+ IC Data Careers
July 20, 2022 11:00 am - 11:50 am
Let's talk about career growth for individual contributors (ICs). The only way to grow in data isn't management. Let's talk to people who have Staff-level roles in Data!
In this panel, we'll have Harlan Harris (Algolia), Paige Berry (Netlify), and Terry Joyce (Trove Recommerce) discuss their own career journeys and how they think about their own careers. They'll talk about their decisions to move up the technical IC career track and considerations that they made.
Slack channel: #meetup-staff-plus-ic-careers
Form to get added to the calendar invite: https://forms.gle/NCNTcNyhNFb8ze2T8
https://github.com/locallyoptimistic/meta/issues/7
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Past Locally Optimistic Events
Data Leadership Events
LO’s meetups are an opportunity for community members to lead conversations about data leadership topics important to them. If you are interested in leading a meetup or suggesting a topic, see more information on our community page. This is a great opportunity to start speaking about data topics in a low-risk way with an amazing community supporting you!
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Locally Optimistic Meetup: Technical & Non-Technical Data Career Ladders
Maura Church, Director of Data Science at Patreon, leads a conversation with the LO community on build a career ladder, aligning expectations across an organization, and setting technical and non technical expectations at various levels for data roles. -
How to Think about Building vs Buying When Building Your Data Stack
As the need for more complex data solutions continues to rise at enterprise organizations, Heads of Data are faced with the challenge of following rapid paradigm shifts in the market and mapping those shifts to both short term business needs and long term strategic investments. When evaluating new platforms and tools, the most commonly asked question remains "Should I buy or build?"
In this fireside chat, we invited three Heads of Data from both public companies and fast growing startups to talk about their own journey evaluating and buying products versus building their own tools, reflecting on their decisions, and sharing the outcomes of their process. -
Locally Optimistic Meetup - Academia to Industry
Aaron Richter, Colleen Tartow, Adam Stone and Marielle Dado discuss their experiences transitioning their careers from academia to industry - finding their first roles, learning how to work with a manager, and identifying their academia-honed super powers to be incredibly effective in industry.
Unfortunately, Zoom recordings don't play well with ASL translation. Please excuse Adam's invisibility in the recording - you'll hear his words but generally won't see his face throughout. -
Locally Optimistic Meetup - Asynchronous Data Teams
Our panel chats about how to improve asynchronous communication among your data team - from the nuts and bolts of tooling and team norms to the hairy challenges of driving organization-wide change. Our stellar panel includes:
- Kelly Burdine, Data Lead at Aula Education
- Erin Hayes, Principal Analytics Engineer at Modern
- Simon Ouderkirk, former Product Manager at Fishtown Analytics and Director of Analytics at WordPress.com -
Locally Optimistic Meetup - Side Projects
Audrey Lorberfeld, Anxhela Coba, and Sherin Varughese chat about how to maintain a long term technical side projects, and how to balance with kids, work, and….a global pandemic. They discuss the challenges of maintaining their connection after leaving IBM, fitting in ‘extracurricular’ work during a time of worldwide burnout, and learning how to communicate across time zones and disciplines. -
Locally Optimistic Meetup - Building a Data Product
4 awesome founders in the data space talk to us about building a data product - how to identify a market need, how to get to your first prototype, how to find cofounders, and more. Our moderator is Mel Hanna of Farmer's Fridge, and our panelists include:
- Stefania Olafsdottir of https://www.avo.app/
- Nick Handel of https://transformdata.io/
- Tejas Manojar of https://www.hightouch.io/
- Barry McCardel of https://hex.tech/
Tool Talks
LO’s Tool Talks are an opportunity for community members to learn about emerging data tools. They consist of a product demo and lots of time for community questions about the tool and uses cases, with both the tool’s team and actual users available to answer questions. If you are interested in leading a tool talk or suggesting a tool for us to feature, see our community page for more information.
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Locally Optimistic Tool Talk: Eppo
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LO Tool Talk - Deepnote
Elizabeth Dlha and Jakub Jurovych introduce us to Deepnote, a new kind of Data Science notebook. They walk us through the product and answer community questions.
https://deepnote.com/ -
Locally Optimistic Tool Talk - Spectacles Round 2
Josh Temple and Dylan Baker of Spectacles walk us through the new dbt integration for Spectacles, and the roadmap for where this integration is going in the future. -
Locally Optimistic Tool Talk - Census
Sean Lynch from Census talks about moving data back out of your data warehouse and into the tools your teams use every day. Includes Q&A from the community about why you might use Census, the new dbt integration, and upcoming improvements. -
Locally Optimistic Tool Talk - Great Expectations
Sam Bail of Superconductive, the team behind https://greatexpectations.io, discusses how Great Expectations helps data teams eliminate pipeline debt through data testing, documentation, and profiling. We begin with a walk through of the tool, with lots of community-led Q&A and some sneak peeks of what is coming up for Great Expectations.
Slides from Sam's talk: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_i4rQc-Z7fHGGnOfV2bufhkAeyJfY0RS/view?usp=sharing -
Locally Optimistic Tool Talk - Iteratively
A conversation with Patrick Thompson and Ondrej Hrebicek of Iteratively (https://iterative.ly/about/) walk us through how to capture clean, consistent events data and answer questions from the Locally Optimistic community about Iteratively.
AMAs
LO’s AMAs are casual interviews with some of our amazing community members, who tell their stories about building and leading data teams, career progression, and their own data journeys. This series is on hold, but if you are interested in helping us revive AMAs, please speak up in #virtual-events in our Slack community!
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Locally Optimistic AMA: Matt Mazur
WordPress.com's Simon Ouderkirk sits down with Matt Mazur, Locally Optimistic community member, freelance data analyst, and serial entrepreneur, to discuss career journeys, analytics knowhow, and communication - also some laughs.
Sharp viewers will also catch Simon mixing up Trotsky and Tolstoy, classic!
You can find all of our content at https://www.locallyoptimistic.com/ -
Locally Optimistic AMA: Claire Carroll
WordPress.com's Simon Ouderkirk sits down with Claire Carroll, Locally Optimistic community member, dbt Community Manager and Analyst at Philadelphia based Fishtown Analytics to discuss career progression, learning from other teams, green flags and red flags, and of course, the infamous LEFT JOIN OR DIE t-shirt!
You can find all of our content at https://www.locallyoptimistic.com/ -
Locally Optimistic AMA: Taylor Murphy
Simon Ouderkirk of WordPress.com sits down with Taylor Murphy of Gitlab to discuss Analytics journeys, a data organization translation of DevOps, hiring for data roles, and moving from a leadership spot into an individual contributor role.
Ingest more great data and analytics content, and join our Slack community at https://www.locallyoptimistic.com/ ! -
Locally Optimistic AMA: Sam Swift
Simon Ouderkirk, Director of Data and Analysis at WordPress.com, sits down with Sam Swift of Bowery Farming to discuss working in data and analysis, the trouble with job titles, and the nature of negotiation within organizations. -
Locally Optimistic AMA: Caitlin Moorman
Caitlin Moorman joins Simon to discuss building a data team, thinking about how to help folks climb their own ladder, and the mysteries of measurement!
