Matthew Powers gave a talk on optimizing data lakes for Apache Spark. He discussed community goals like standardizing method signatures. He advocated for using Spark helper libraries like spark-daria and spark-fast-tests. Powers explained how to build better data lakes using techniques like partitioning data on relevant fields to skip data and speed up queries significantly. He also covered modern Scala libraries, incremental updates, compacting small files, and using Delta Lakes to more easily update partitioned data lakes over time.