The author attended the Coalesce conference and reflects on their favorite moments from the event, focusing on business applications of analytics engineering and dbt. They highlight talks by David Jayatillake, Sydney Burns, Josh Devlin, John Kennedy, Lindsay Murphy, Emilie Schario, Kshitij Aranke, Boris Jabes, Julia King, Marc Stone, Jake Thomas, Emily Hawkins, and Dylan Hughes, who discussed topics such as the benefits of analytics engineering, the relevance of Kimball's work, the importance of teaching stakeholders how to fish, the limitations of "data-led" thinking, data change management, event-driven dbt models, and more. The author notes that the conference was one of the best they've attended and highlights the growth and diversity of the dbt community, as well as the need for data leaders to focus on operational analytics and teaching tech skills to stakeholders.