Brisbane Snowflake User Group – August 2026

I attended the Brisbane Snowflake User Group meetup, hosted by Mantel on 26 August 2026 with some of my colleagues. The evening opened with a fireside chat (moderated by Snowflake’s Raj Sharma) on building a data literacy culture at Domino’s and rolling out Snowflake CoWork (Daria) to non-technical staff. Brad de Bruyns of Vivanti then demonstrated a code-first approach to Power BI development using Snowflake CoCo, showing how the shift to PBIP-format reports, Snowflake Semantic Views, and CoCo “Skills” enables version-controlled, AI-assisted report building governed by an OpenSpec change process and CI/CD pipeline. Snowflake’s Majid Miri and Yuqi Zheng closed out the evening with a broader rundown of Summit 2026’s announcements including the CoWork/CoCo rebrand, Horizon Context and Cortex Sense, AI Agent Identity, Apache Iceberg v3 reaching GA, and new ingestion tooling in OpenFlow and Datastream, framing them as the building blocks of a governed, agentic enterprise platform.

Innovations at Domino’s with Snowflake – Bianca Gilchrist – Domino’s

Bianca Gilchrist, Domino’s Data Literacy & Visualisation Lead and Snowflake Data Hero of the Year, spoke about building a data literacy culture at Domino’s and driving the rollout of Snowflake CoWork, branded internally as Daria, to non-technical staff.

  • “Every story, every report that we put out has to have a story behind it” – reports should read like an analyst’s narrative, not a grid of numbers
  • Run weekly “15-minute bites” sessions where staff watch live Q&A with Daria on calls – showing how easy it is to ask a question and get an answer, which then prompts a flow of similar questions from the team over following days
  • Wrote two data literacy books for children: the A to Z of data and The Australian Data Story, and is developing a schools program with Snowflake to bring young kids into the data field
  • Three pillars of data literacy: accessibility (can people find the data), usability (what can they do with it), and storytelling
  • Marketing data internally – relentless, visible promotion (Viva posts, being put in front of every group) is essential to getting data trusted and used
  • One of the biggest recurring business questions the agent gets used for: when a limited-time offer or new product launches, is it cannibalising sales from other products – this previously took a Business Analyst half a day to a week to answer in Power BI, now answered by Daria in minutes
  • You need to show a working model quickly, since people can’t visualise an idea from a description alone
  • Had to explicitly instruct Daria to be more pessimistic — it was originally overly optimistic (e.g. overstating cost savings), so instructions were added to correct this and avoid dollar-figure recommendations, and to only make recommendations in the voucher area, not financial matters
  • Staff are given daily prompt limits partly to control cost, but also to keep people using the core “gold standard” Power BI reports for standard metrics, ensuring the numbers people see match what the CEO sees
  • Cost and usage limits are a live tension, staff loved unlimited prompts for two months and pushed back hard on new daily caps
  • Future focus is to get the AI agent to redirect simple, reportable questions back to the core Power BI reports, and expanding into specialised sub-agents

Power BI Report development with Snowflake CoCo – Brad de Bruyns – Vivanti

Brad de Bruyns, Senior Consultant at Vivanti (and a former Domino’s colleague of Bianca’s), demonstrated a code-first approach to Power BI development using Snowflake CoCo, showing how AI can turn report-building into a version-controlled, code-based workflow rather than manual clicking in binary files.

  • The traditional Power BI PBIX format is opaque and can’t be diffed, whereas the newer PBIP format exposes reports as text so it is version-controllable, diffable, and peer-reviewable in Git
  • Snowflake Semantic Views were used as the single source of truth for metrics, shared across both CoWork (formerly Snowflake Intelligence) and Power BI
  • Demonstrated CoCo “Skills” baked directly into the repository – encoding branding, DAX standards, layouts, and complex JSON so AI-generated reports and measures come out brand-compliant and consistent every time
  • Walked through a live OpenSpec demo: a plain-English request (“add a detailed credit consumption by type page”) was turned into a structured Propose > Explore > Apply process, generating a proposal, design doc, and task list before any changes were made
  • Deployment ran through a disciplined Azure DevOps CI/CD pipeline, validating and deploying automatically across Dev, Test and Production
  • Underlying agent is CoCo, essentially Claude-like – any Claude-style skills apply the same way
  • The Power BI semantic model and the Snowflake semantic view are currently separate but kept in sync via the same underlying spec with a further skill able to uplift a Power BI model into a semantic view
  • Manage multiple reports / workspaces in one repo (config-driven via subfolders and deployment targets)
  • Started from screenshots / Figma mockups instead of specs and outputs remain fully manually editable afterwards, since it’s still a standard Power BI file underneath
  • Less time memorising palettes and file structures, more time on the data modelling and insights that actually matter

Highlights & Key Takeaways from Snowflake Summit 2026 – Majid Miri & Yuqi Zheng – Snowflake

Majid Miri (Senior Solution Engineer) and Yuqi Zheng (Associate Solution Engineer) closed the evening with a rundown of Snowflake Summit 26 announcements, framed around the theme of the “agentic enterprise” and what’s needed to scale AI safely across an organisation.

  • CoWork and CoCo rebrands: Snowflake Intelligence is now CoWork, the agent for business users; Cortex Code is now CoCo, the builder’s agent — both reaching a wider surface (desktop, mobile, Slack) since launch
  • Horizon Context and Cortex Sense: supply governed business context and definitions to agents, aiming to eliminate the cold start problem of enterprise AI needing weeks of manual semantic modelling
  • AI Agent Identity: gives every agent a verifiable, cryptographic identity and a complete audit trail, distinguishing agent-driven queries from human ones for access control purposes
  • Apache Iceberg v3: reached general availability, with broad support for new data types, cross-system change tracking, and high performance on semi-structured data paired with Snowflake-managed Iceberg storage to cut operational overhead
  • OpenFlow and Datastream: managed data ingestion, OpenFlow for extract/load workflows with new connectors, Datastream as a new Kafka-compatible managed streaming service with separated storage/compute scaling
  • Control plane for a governed agentic enterprise – the connective layer of data, context, identity, and governance needed to run AI safely at scale
  • Gartner predicts that by 2028 the average Fortune 500 company will have over 150,000 agents, underscoring the need for centralised governance and observability
  • Deepened partnership with Anthropic, with Claude positioned as the default reasoning layer underneath both CoWork and CoCo

Episode 191: Accelerating DevOps with Jez Humble

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Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Sydney and after many years of chasing him around finally get to speak to Jez Humble, co-author of many fine books including “Continuous Delivery“, “Lean Enterprise“, “The DevOps Handbook” and “Accelerate” and they discuss:

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Episode 187: Domain Driven Yak Symmathesy with Jessica Kerr

The Agile Revolution's avatarThe Agile Revolution Podcast

 

Tony and Craig are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and chat to Jessica Kerr, software developer, consultant and symmathecist (look it up or listen to the podcast) and apart from our first live podcast sneeze they talk about:

 
  • YOW! 2018 keynote “The Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming
  • YOW! 2018 talk “Shaving the Golden Yak
  • Great teams make great people – if you want to become great as a developer, focus on the team
  • You can’t document what is obvious to you – whenever you say the word obviously, replace it with “I cant explain it, but…”
  • Yak shaving – all the tasks that you do that get in the way of your work
  • If you are an agile person but you wish agile had more code in it – go to the Domain Driven Design community
  • We need to embrace complexity…

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Episode 186: Managing the Unmanageable with Ron Lichty

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Craig fires some questions at Ron Lichty, co-author of “Managing the Unmanageable” and the “Study of Product Team Performance“:

  • Author of machine Language programming books “Programming the Apple IIGS in Assembly Language” and “Programming the 65816
  • Managing the Finder team at Apple – hired for stellar C++ coding ability and customer empathy
  • Software development is a team sport – including QA, a dedicated product manager / product owner and designers
  • After Dark and Flying Toasters at Berkeley Systems
  • “Managing the Unmnageable” is 9 chapters and around 300 rules of thumb and nuggets of wisdom (the creamy centre), the tools used to manage software development teams plus the authors own insights
  • There were very few books (7 at the time) on managing software developers (unlike project management and agile)
  • Fred Brooks – “The Mythical Man-Month
  • Situational Leadership – opens your…

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Episode 171 – Beyond Legacy Code with David Bernstein

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Craig is at Agile 2017 in Orlando, Florida and speaks with David Bernstein, author of “Beyond Legacy Code“, and they chat about agile technical practices:

  • Agile does have something to with software development
  • Agile 2017 talk “Create Software Quality
  • The real value of Agile is in the technical practices so we can build iteratively, but still very few people practice them
  • The future is already here, but it is not very well evenly distributed – the same applies to Agile
  • Companies are being consumed by their technical debt and they don’t even recognise it
  • What is always cheaper in the virtual domain is building quality
  • Continuous Integration makes the most painful thing in software development (integration) our greatest asset – this in turn gives us feedback
  • We don’t necessarily know there is a better way to do things – but there is a better way to…

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Episode 151: Software Craftsmanship with “Uncle Bob” Martin

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Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference and are honoured to sit down with Robert C. Martin (aka Uncle Bob), signatory to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and author of numerous books including “Clean Code“, “The Clean Coder” and “Clean Architecture” and they discuss:

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The 2018 InfoQ Editors’ Recommended Reading List: Part Two

As part of our core values of sharing knowledge, the InfoQ editors were keen to capture and share our book and article recommendations for 2018, so that others can benefit from this too. In this second part we are sharing the final batch of recommendations

Source: The 2018 InfoQ Editors’ Recommended Reading List: Part Two

Episode 135: DevOps & Electric Cloud with Anders Wallgren

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Craig speaks to Anders Wallgren from Electric Cloud about Continuous Delivery and DevOps at the Agile 2016 conference in Atlanta. The topic of conversation included:

  • Release It!” by Michael Nygard
  • We can’t declare victory on Agile, but it is the winning methodology
  • We are now plumbing the last mile of deployment and we also need to move it left
  • Joshua Kerievsky Agile 2016 keynote on “Modern Agile
  • Software process is like human DNA, we are different but essentially the same
  • Gene Gotimer Agile 2016 talk “Experiences Bringing Continuous Delivery to a DoD Project
  • You will fail if you don’t pay attention to the cultural aspects of Agile and DevOps
  • State of DevOps Report
  • Critical to automate everything to eliminate manual process errors and loss of valuable data
  • DevOps is starting to push into complex and regulated environments like finance, health and aerospace with an…

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ThoughtWorks Sold to Private Equity Firm Apax Partners

Global software development and digital transformation company ThoughtWorks is to be acquired by London-based private equity firm Apax Partners. The terms of the deal were not disclosed and it is expected to close in Q4 2017.

Source: ThoughtWorks Sold to Private Equity Firm Apax Partners

Google Cloud Data Pipeline Patterns

At the recent YOW! Night in Brisbane (as well and Sydney and Melbourne), Lynn Langit, and independent software consultant and cloud expert presented “Google Cloud Data Pipeline Patterns”.  It was great to meet her, here are my notes from the event:

Lynn Langit

  • Storage is so simple you don’t need to think about it – data lake architecture
  • Simply select how much memory and how many cores and it computes the cost
  • Google is quick because they are laying their own fibre and using their own infrastructure – less than a minute to spin up a VM, with no local data centre
  • Chrome has a RDP client – who knew
  • Google philosophy is you shouldn’t have to hire someone to manage the pricing
  • Bioinformatics is new to the cloud and they are in great need of engineers, Google is having a stab at a genomics API
  • BigQuery is NoOps, has been evolved to be a data warehouse, with no servers,
  • Big Relational if you just want SQL, Amazon Aurora is the fastest growing cloud database, Google has released Cloud Spanner, first database to truly meet CAP theory
  • BigQuery is column store, Cloud Spanner is OLTP
  • MQTT seems to be coming the defacto standard for IoT
  • IoT uses BigTable first and BigQuery second in Google reference architectures, because it is cheaper
  • Python is the emerging ML language for some reason
  • Teaching Kids Programming