The author, Rahul Joshi, describes his approach to creating a "Modern Data Stack in a box" using dlt, dbt, DuckDB, MotherDuck, and Metabase. He started by pulling all data from different sources into a local DuckDB instance on his laptop for development and customization. The author created two pipelines: one for loading Google Analytics 4 events data from BigQuery into DuckDB and another for loading GitHub API data into DuckDB. He used dbt to perform data transformations and Metabase to visualize the data in a dashboard. To deploy the pipeline to production, he used MotherDuck, a serverless cloud analytics platform built on top of DuckDB, which allows seamless integration with dlt, dbt, and Metabase. The author found this approach to be simple, customizable, and easy to use, making it an ideal solution for creating a Modern Data Stack in a box.