Lunch Talk Series: What Would the Django of Data Pipelines Look Like

This iteration of the Lunch Talk Series will be covering Lisa Dusseault’s adaptive DjangoCon US talk, “What would the django of data pipelines look like?”.

You should watch this if:

• You’re interested in contributing to Phaser.
• You’re interested in data pipeline frameworks.
• You’re interested learning how to approach building your own framework.

This talk is centered around data pipelines and the new framework she has built called Phaser. Lisa provides an overview of the challenges of ETL and homegrown solutions. She then goes on to explain why a framework would be perfect. She then introduces Phaser, how to use it and where it solves several problems. It immediately got me thinking about how I could use it with multiple data sources at my previous job.

Throughout the entire talk, Lisa shows deep appreciation for other libraries, specifically Django. I found that her humor and honesty helped keep me connected to her presentation.

This talk highlights the challenges of creating something new. It’s not only that you have to build it, but you have to find people to use it and contribute back to it so that it becomes sustainable. This talk is a good example of how to connect and draw people in.

My takeaway from this talk is to remain focused on my primary audience. For Phaser, it’s developers, so the framework was designed with the developer experience as the main concern. This idea isn’t new, it’s the same as “keep first things first,” but it’s not always easy to do. I appreciate the reminder!