Joel Labes
Staff Developer Experience Advocate
Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoel Labes is a Staff Developer Experience Advocate at dbt Labs with six years of hands-on experience helping data teams ship reliable analytics tooling. He blends front-end polish and documentation UX with core data engineering work—contributing to high-profile open-source projects like dbt-core, dbt-utils, and the docs.getdbt.com site to improve both developer workflows and end-user documentation. Previously he led Data & Insights at Education Perfect, moving from systems management into analytics leadership, which gives him a rare perspective spanning product, infrastructure, and content. Joel is particularly skilled at translating complex BigQuery and dbt adapter issues into maintainable code and tests, and he often focuses on developer-facing refinements that make large projects easier to adopt. Based in Wellington, New Zealand, he pairs pragmatic engineering with a strong emphasis on documentation and UX, quietly driving adoption through small but impactful improvements.
5 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
John McGlashan College
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (19)
bigquery10
data-pipelines10
python10
data-engineering10
macros10
data-modeling10
css10
analytics10
dbt10
sql10
docusaurus10
data-pipeline10
documentation10
testing9
javascript9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
dbt-labs/dbt-utils
Sep 2020 - Jan 2023
Utility functions for dbt projects.
Role in this project:
Data Engineer
Data EngineerContributions:19 releases, 191 reviews, 88 commits in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Joel primarily contributed to the `dbt-utils` repository, focusing on creating and maintaining utility functions for dbt projects. Their work included implementing schema tests like `accepted_range` and addressing errors in existing tests, like cardinality tests. The user also made changes to the `get_column_values` macro, and incorporated updates to the code related to version releases and compatibility.
dbtutility-functionssqlterminology
dbt-labs/docs.getdbt.com
Jul 2021 - Jan 2023
The code behind docs.getdbt.com
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:314 reviews, 92 commits, 181 PRs in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Joel made multiple contributions to the `dbt-labs/docs.getdbt.com` repository, primarily involving front-end and documentation updates. They modified CSS files, adjusted blog layouts and styles, and updated the codebase to reflect new features. Additionally, the user was involved in refactoring and restructuring documentation content. The commits demonstrate a focus on improving the user interface and enhancing the documentation experience.
code-behind
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