This autumn 🍂, I'm thrilled to be:
Check out some of my previous engagements and projects below!
Organised by SentinelOne and Kiwi.com, I was invited to join Radka and Tomáš & Julia to speak on any topic related to data modelling. Taking this quite literally, I opted for a gambler’s approach with a talk titled “Let’s Face It: Your Data Models Are Broken”, drawing loosely on positive data nihilism. The feedback was unexpectedly enthusiastic, so I might take it even further next time!
With the school year 2023/24 well underway, I stepped in to teach IT for a few weeks to students aged 12–16 at Labyrinth, a private primary & secondary school in Brno. Thanks to Břetislav's invitation, I gained invaluable insights into their innovative learning and feedback methods. Collaborating with Štěpánka, Anna, and Luděk was particularly inspiring, while witnessing the students' enthusiasm was truly rewarding.
I was invited by Czechitas to sit on a jury to evaluate data projects of emerging data analysts who just finished the Data Academy in Brno. I was joined by Jan in spring 2024, by Barbora and Adam in both spring and autumn 2023, and by Milada and Pavel in autumn 2022. It was amazing to see it was (almost) all about using open data or making an analysis for a good cause!
I've once again had the privilege of delivering a data storytelling lesson for Czechitas' Data Academy in Brno, just as I did in Nov 2023, May 2023 (both online in Prague and in a hybrid format in Brno), as well as in Nov 2022, May 2022, and Nov 2021. It's always a delightful experience!
Slido teamed up with STRV and Kiwi.com to organise two data meetups in Czechia over two days – one in Prague and one in Brno. The topic was "Flavours of Data Stack", where each team showcased technical solutions to their company's business problems. I was joined on stage by Mimi, Jozef, Peter, and Stanislav, with these slides having been presented to the audience.
Slido and Kiwi.com initiated a series of data meetups in Bratislava, aimed at fostering inspiration and best practices amongst local data practitioners. I had the honour of hosting a few editions – #1 on analytics, #3 on data engineering, and #6 on Python in cloud. You can even check out the recording from the first one to gauge the event's quality for yourself.
I recently dropped by the Faculty of Economics at Masaryk University with a session "From Excel to Data Product (and Beyond!)", following an unexpected invite from my master's thesis supervisor, Marketa Matulová. Aimed at students of Business Data Analytics, the talk sparked great feedback. It was a unique chance to revisit my alma mater and dive into discussions that bridged academia with real-world applications.
Following an invitation from Pavel Šafařík, I had the opportunity to present to a non-data audience for the first time – at a meetup for the local product community, attracting nearly 100 attendees. I shared the stage with fellow speaker Anita Friess and the experience was thoroughly enjoyable. Though my talk "Data Team? Product Team!" felt like a bit of a gamble, it appeared that the audience had fun just as much.
More than a year after discovering Začni učit!, I decided to engage further with their educators community by joining their subsequent offering specifically designed for novice teachers. The programme Zauč se! spanned an entire semester of autumn and included 9 sessions totalling 38 hours of learning alongside a small, cohesive group of 11 like-minded individuals. What an intensive and inspiring ride it was!
During the autumn semester of 2023, Tomáš Marek and I led a data-focused course at the Faculty of Arts at Masaryk University, aimed at adult lifelong learners. Our curriculum spanned philosophical foundations, practical skills, and visualisations tactics. Combining discussion-style webinars with e-learning lessons, we fostered an interactive and self-directed learning environment.
After launching the first-ever dbt meetup in Czechia and Slovakia last autumn, Jozef from STRV returned this year with a fresh twist – a breakfast gathering. He invited me to co-host, and we were joined by Arthur from EssenceMediacom, Veronika from GAMEE, and Matěj & Robert from Revolt BI. Our speakers discussed their recent data challenges and sat on a panel on "Data Team's ROI". Who says breakfast is just about the food?
In the summer of 2023, I contributed to digital transformation efforts at the regional innovation agency JINAG. Our focus was on merging several legacy, isolated systems into a unified source of truth. After careful consideration, the team selected Notion as the preferred tool, integrating documentation, project management, and a flexible CRM system into a single, modern environment.
In collaboration with O'Reilly Media, a renowned publisher of tech books, I had the privilege of giving a technical review on Analytics Engineering with SQL and dbt. The focus was on building meaningful data models at scale, a topic vital to the industry. It was an enriching experience to delve into the intricacies of analytics engineering and contribute to a resource aimed at the broader community.
As a part of the data meetup series organised by Slido and Kiwi.com, we decided to throw in a summer edition – Summer Data Fest. I opened with a rather philosophical talk on data nihilism, Jozef from STRV shared about the "Funny Side of Data" and Martina from Kiwi.com led a panel discussion about ChatGPT's impact on the data ecosystem. What a lovely evening spent with 100+ enthusiasts from the local data community!
Alongside Břetislav Svozil and Vojtěch Krmíček, we crafted a strategy for fostering entrepreneurship at ZŠ Labyrinth in Brno. Our approach is threefold: entrepreneurship lessons in the curriculum, a collaborative space called JuniorHub, and inspirational community events. All aim to empower children to realise their ideas for transforming the world around them. Good luck to all the young minds embarking on this journey!
Following in the footsteps of Prague and Brno, Bratislava has now hosted its very own dbt meetup, too. I was thrilled to get invited to speak at the event and chose to share my insights on promoting data culture through dbt. In good company, I was joined by Radek from LMC and Tomáš from Infinite Lambda. It was a real treat, exchanging ideas and pooling our shared knowledge!
Under the banner of JIC, I crafted a brief data-viz narrative to enrich the context of a project promoting technical education. The analysis dove into stats on secondary school and university students, particularly focusing on technical disciplines. I was happy to receive a positive feedback later after presenting it to representatives from the private sector and the South Moravia Region.
I was asked by Petr Bouchal from České priority to lead a workshop on Apache Superset, a visualisation tool we've been long using at Slido. With representatives from Technology Agency of the Czech Republic, Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic, and CzechInvest, it was a lively discussion that delved into the similarities and differences in our use cases between the private and public sectors.
As a follow-up on my podcast episode of Data Talk, Jiří Vicherek and Karel Šimánek asked me to speak at their first-ever Data Mesh meetup in Brno. I had a blast sharing my insights on the power of using a product management mindset to drive data product success at Slido.
I had a chance to appear as a guest on a podcast episode of Data Talk. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I was thrilled about the idea. And it didn't disappoint! I ended up having an inspiring conversation with two other data enthusiasts – Jiří Vicherek and Karel Šimánek – about the people, technology, and overarching philosophy behind our data story at Slido.
I collaborated with Michal from Kontent.ai to organise the first dbt meetup in Brno., held at Kentico HQ. We strived for introducing this beloved data tool of ours to local audience through these talks from Michal himself, Ivo from Slido, and Pavel from STRV. As I also had the pleasure to host the event, I've found it to be great fun! And – based on the feedback (4.9/5) – I might not have been alone.
I had the opportunity to speak at a datavis meetup that I've been attending from its very beginning. With the aim to kick off a future line-up of talks from the business environment, I went for a general topic of building a data team.
Twice was I honoured to speak at Coalesce, the analytics engineering conference. In 2022, I joined my colleagues to talk about Data API we built at Slido, as well as Elizabeth from Deepnote to share some thoughts on bringing a product mindset to data analytics. In 2021, we shared our Slido analytics story and I demoed dbt-superset-lineage, a Python-coded open-source CLI app that connects dbt and Superset.
Our data team at Slido joined forces with Productboard to organise a data meetup in Prague on the topic of analytics engineering. The event was packed with interesting content with my talk focused on the practices we adopted and their impact on our everyday work. What a fun evening!
I mentored pairs of emerging data analysts and supported them on their final projects at Brno's edition of Data Academy at Czechitas during spring 2022 (Katarína and Hanna: communication evaluation of Slovak districts; Ivana and Kateřina: analysis of politicians' tweets about immigration), as well as autumn 2021 (Renáta and Daniela: cybercrime) and 2020 (Adéla and Elena: Brno's participatory budget).
At the beginning of 2022, I got very excited by changes to the way IT gets taught in the Czech Republic. As a result, I spent one week at a primary school in Písek teaching 12 and 15-year-old kids about IT using the priciples of computational thinking. All thanks to an amazing educational project called Začni učit!.
To create this very website, I learned quite a bit about Jekyll and reminded myself of some CSS and HTML. Thanks to that, I also significantly improved my digital garden, as well as made automations to it through Python and bash scripts.
When playing around with some tools of the modern data stack, I ended up building a minimalistic and free version of it called Modern Data Stack for All at one-data-cookie/mds4all-elt and one-data-cookie/mds4all-superset whilst utilising GitHub, Google BigQuery, Meltano, dbt, Superset, and Heroku.
Tomáš Marek, Jáchym Kubáček, and myself put together a course on data literacy at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University. The initial audience consisted mostly of librarians, however, we also created an online course designed for and available to anyone.
I was invited by Milad Abassi to help out JIC, the Innovation Centre for South Moravian Region, with standardising their geo data from multiple sources. As a part of the process, I created geocode-mapycz that wraps JavaScript geocoding API of Mapy.cz in Python.
I was at the inception of datavis meetups, hence I was helping out a bit at the beginning and have been taking part since. We meet in Brno and talk about anything related to data visualisation in quite a casual environment; featuring speakers from NGOs, print media, public sector, universities, and businesses.
Excited by Slack's API, I put together two scripts: a Python emoji stats snippet and a Javascript ticketing system. I also wrote two blog posts (here & here) detailing them for an Advent article series. They've collectively got around 8k views and 4k reads – a very pleasant surprise!