Editorial

Cross Government Data Engineering Event – April 26th

Leaders in data engineering from across the civil service share insight and knowledge in this online afternoon event

Posted 12 April 2023 by Matt Stanley


As we build and complete our agenda for the Think Data for Government conference on May 27th we have been having some very insightful and interesting discussions with departments all across the public sector. One particular conversation has focused on a half-day cross government event focusing on data engineering. The event is a virtual only event and takes place between 2pm – 4pm on Wednesday 26th April.

This is a series focusing on short, bullet presentations on data engineering across government. It will cover a broad range of projects and problems, as well as the infrastructure, tooling and techniques used to tackle them in multiple government departments. You must work within the Civil Service or the public sector in order to attend but you don’t need to be a data engineer.

Presentations on the day come from a variety of government departments including Department for Transport, Ministry of Justice, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Department for Business and Trade, Office for National Statistics and Defence Science and Technology Laboratory.

Agenda topics include:

  • Wrangling complex data
  • Managed pipelines and serverless data analytic AWS services
  • Energy statistics and the ideal of reproducibility: a data engineering challenge 
  • Ingesting real time dover traffic data using data flow (GCP)
  • Data Workspace – putting DBT’s data to good use
  • CPI transformation on GCP
  • Excel Analyst to Azure Data Engineer – Dstl’s evolving approach to data.

One of the event organisers (based at the Department for Transport) said, “This Data Engineering meetup is the fourth in what we intend to be a regular and long running series. The aim of this event is to bring together data engineers, DDaT professionals, and other interested colleagues from across the Civil Service. We are excited to refresh this series following a hiatus, and get to know our wider community. We want attendees to learn something new about practices, challenges, tools used in other government departments and build up their network.”

Previous delegate feedback included, (from an ONS delegate) “Great event organised by and for Data Engineers. I enjoyed and learnt from seeing what other departments have been doing in this space. I usually come away from these events with a lacklustre feeling, some high level concepts but less applicable technical and relatable examples. This was different, the presenters did a great job pitching the presentations at the right level. My only complaint is I couldn’t go to all the sessions!” (and from a MoD delegate), “Amazing series of talks really focusing on the practical and applied side of data engineering, showcasing the creativity and knowledge of those working in this space in the public sector. Really fills a gap in this community as it is geared towards those on the ground, building pipelines, managing metadata and defining standards when it comes to all things data. All data related professionals stand to gain a greater appreciation for the inner workings of data flows at an enterprise scale.”

To register for this data engineering event click here.