Community & Events

I co-hosted the first Wellington Apache Airflow meetup on 29 October 2026 at Victoria University of Wellington. A full room came for an evening of talks, discussion and networking for Airflow users and data engineers, and the conversations ran past 9pm. Kieran Hume (Chorus) spoke on "Why I don't think about Airflow," and Yan Dai (Deloitte) walked through orchestrating a document AI pipeline with Airflow, from raw files to validated knowledge. Discussion covered why teams stay on Airflow rather than switching orchestrators, how atomic a task in a DAG should be, and how to build human-in-the-loop AI workflows with Airflow. Thanks to Astronomer, the Apache Airflow community, and the Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at Victoria University of Wellington for the food, drinks, swag, volunteers and venue. The next meetup is already being planned.

I spoke at this IEEE Young Professionals seminar at Victoria University of Wellington, alongside Asad Moin (Bastion Security) and Dr. Kaan Demir (Accenture). I opened with joining Wētā FX as a rookie who knew nothing about VFX: I started small, reading alerts, fixing what I could, and asking a lot of questions. The core message: a job isn't the only place to get experience. Find a real problem, keep asking why until you truly understand it, and put your work where people can see it. Find one thing. Do it well. Do it publicly.

Hosted by IEEE Young Professionals at Victoria University of Wellington, this panel brought together students, researchers, and industry professionals to discuss career pathways, workplace expectations, and the practical skills needed to move from academia into industry. I joined Dr. Harisu Abdullahi Shehu, Dr. Kaan Demir, and Dr. Shima Afzaali as panelists, with support from IEEE NZ Central Section and CDSAI.