Here comes Apache Kafka Workshop in Warsaw Poland
That’d been not so long since the first workshop with Apache Kafka and Kafka Streams when I was asked to run a workshop with Apache Kafka. I’ve had more and more workshops with Apache Kafka recently (mostly for developers), but the recent inquiry was completely different — I had to prepare a workshop as much for developers as for administrators (!) Given that I’m more a software engineer than an administrator or a devops engineer, that looked quite a challenge to me to accept. I did have a lot of questions, concerns and doubts and, as you may be very well aware of, no two people are the same even if their profiles seem to say so (that makes the preparation process tricky as before with not much hope for drawing conclusions from past workshops. Ouch!)
I’ve always been saying that to really understand a tool (be it my lovely Apache Spark or Apache Kafka or Scala) and really learn it by heart is simply to teach others. That exposes you to challenging questions that you might not even have thought to ask yourself. I like being challenged and that was indeed a mental challenge to get right so I feared not and said “Yes!”
Today’s Friday a day after the Apache Kafka Workshop that I ran in Warsaw Poland. I had an immense pleasure to teach 11 people (developers and one admin as it later turned out) how to use Kafka effectively.
The agenda included how to set up an Apache Kafka cluster (with one and many brokers), how to fine-tune it and after developing Kafka applications (using Consumer and Producer APIs in Java and Scala) we moved to exploring how Kafka Streams API can make our developer lives even simpler. We managed to do quite a few exercises and had a bit of theory too (I prefer teaching by practice than theory and hence the name of the trainings — workshops).
The slides for the agenda and the exercises are on my github at http://blog.jaceklaskowski.pl/kafka-workshop (I do need to find a better domain for the workshops to get better publicity, don’t I?).
Consider the materials a work in progress. There are two more Kafka workshops coming in the following week so expect changes and adjustments as I go over them again and again. Let me know if there’s anything to make the materials better. Dzięki!
