Martin Westfall presents how About You, an e-commerce fashion company, built a data consolidation system called 'Cube' using PHP and Laravel over 2.5 years. Despite initial skepticism about using PHP for big data, the team successfully created a system that handles massive data processing through clever chunking, custom collection implementations, and integration with Google BigQuery. The talk covers their journey of overcoming PHP's limitations, performance optimization, and building a scalable system that saved costs compared to their previous Hadoop solution.