WIT Newsletter January 2026
Happy 2026! We hope you had a wonderful holiday season, however you celebrated. We’re ready to kick off a new year with all of you.
We’re looking forward to continuing our monthly meeting in the new year. We wanted to start by thanking all those who presented a session for our meetup in 2025: Joy Apple, Andrea Rosales, Surbhi Pokharna, Shriya Agarwal, Akshata Revankar, Paula García Esteban, Els van Vessem, Gilda Alvarez, Kristy Mishra, Tiffany Portis, Pragati Jain, Grace O’Halloran, and Blythe Morrow. Blythe finished our year with her fantastic presentation, “Critical Communication: Manage Yourself and Others.” If you missed it or any of these great presentations, you can still catch them on our YouTube channel.
We’re looking forward to our first meetup for 2026. Juliana Smith will be kicking things off with “Uncovering the Secrets of Dashboard Design”. To find out more details and RSVP on the event page.
We’re making plans for this year to do more to support all of you. We can’t do it alone; we need your support. If there is something more that we can do to help support you, feel free to reach out to us. In the meantime, here are some things you can do, both in the community at large as well as internally in your own company as well:
- Attend our meetups as well the ones by other WIT groups
- Attend other upcoming sessions given by WIT speakers, like those listed below
- Read and share blogs by WIT
- Volunteer at events and get involved
- Tell others about all of these events and invite them to join you
- Look for opportunities to lift up WIT
- Join WIT networking groups to see how you can further help
- DM, email, connect on LinkedIn, etc., to share with us your thoughts and ideas on what we can do to improve
We look forward to spending 2026 building and supporting this wonderful WIT community with all of our Data Platform WIT!
Deborah, Tracy & Kristy
Data Left Unattended – Amsterdam – January 15
| Speaker | Session Title |
| Chrissy LeMaire | Importing unstructured data from PDF to SQL Server |
| Heini Ilmarinen | Streaming Super Smash – Microsoft Fabric vs. Databricks |
| Juliana Smith | Accidental Data Lies: How Poor Visual Choices Can Mislead |
| Traci Sewell | When the firehose causes the Burnout |
Partner Vibe – January 28-30
| Speaker | Session Title |
| Ginger Grant | Using AI to Improve Data Productivity |
| Leslie Welch | Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls, Deliver Power BI Faster With Iterative Design |
| It’s Only a Model – Demystifying Row Level Security in Power BI Part I | |
| It’s Only a Model – Demystifying Row Level Security in Power BI Part II | |
| Tracy Boggiano | From Data to Downtime: Safeguarding IT Professionals’ Mental Health and Well-being |
Cloud Tech Tallinn 2026 – January 29-30
| Speaker | Session Title |
| Laura Graham-Brown | 2 Power BI Storage Modes, 1 Dataverse: Tips and Tricks to Optimize your Reports |
| Lisa Hoving | Help, my Azure Databricks is too expensive! Some tips and tricks. |
| Valerie Junk | Get Creative with Power BI: Make these core visuals shine! |
Data Saturday Denmark – January 31
| Speaker | Session Title |
| Anne Holst-Dyrnes | Getting into Git with Power BI |
| Emily Harden | I Hope I’m Not the Smartest Person in the Room |
| Joanna Cichowicz | Women in Tech: How Power Platform is Redefining the Rules? |
| Karianne Kies | Metadata Scanner API: Unlock Metdadata possibilities |
| Kosy Ashara | Thriving as a Black Woman in Tech: Lessons from Data, AI & Banking |
| Laura de Bruin | Empowering your data platform with AI |
| Maíra D’Eleutério | From Code to Care: Navigating Tech, Entrepreneurship, and Motherhood |
| How The Heineken Brazil Company uses Power Platform and Citizen Developers for your tech revolution | |
| Shubhangi Goyal | Customer-First Analytics: Power BI Dashboard for Impact |