Auckland Data Eng meetup, August 2026

Hey all, please join us for our August Auckland Data Eng meetup. Join us for an engaging session filled with exciting discussions and networking opportunities.

Don't miss out—RSVP to secure your spot. Venue and catering details coming soon — we'll update this page as soon as they're confirmed! 🎉

🏠 Location: TBC
🍕 Catering: TBC
💬 Join our Slack Group here: Data Engineers Slack Channel
Schedule:

5.00pm: Doors Open
5.20pm: Announcements and Welcome
5.30pm: 1st Talk (25 mins + 5 min Q/A)
6.00pm: 2nd Talk (25 mins + 5 min Q/A)
6.30pm: 3rd Talk (25 mins + 5 min Q/A)
7.00pm: Networking
8.00pm: Doors Close

Speakers:
🎤 Emily Melhuish, Data Engineer, Independent
Talk Title: Fire and Ice: Building a data platform to power solar operations
Talk Summary: Solar farms are part of the answer to a renewable energy future. These massive solar arrays take power from the sun and safely deliver it to the grid to then be used by us, the consumer. Efficiency gains of even 1% can make a big difference in the feasibility of solar, so having rock solid analytics at scale is a necessity. More and more farms are being built and therefore the cost to get said analytics is also important.
Join Emily as she walks through the constraints of the solar industry and how she built a data platform for solar farms on a budget using almost entirely open-source tools. In some parts real-time matters, in others, a one hour lag is acceptable - how can we use the best of both batch and streaming worlds to keep pipelines performant but also cheap? She'll focus on Apache Iceberg, an open table format, as well as touch on Victoria Metrics and DuckDB.
Speaker Bio: Emily loves to be involved in a range of things from blowing up circuits to riding horses to rockets. She's an Electrical Engineer by trade but has found herself working in the realms of software and data science. With a passion for both hardware and software, she hopes to combine the two to make technology smarter and more sustainable. Curr