Greetings Kafka and Flink enthusiasts! Current 2023 is a wrap, and we hope all of you who made it to the event (in-person or online) learned a lot, got inspired, and connected with some of the incredible speakers and attendees! If you weren’t able to attend, never fear! You can watch the Day 1 keynote here, and the Day 2 keynote here. Recordings of the breakout sessions are on the way and will be shared in our newsletter when they are available. Now on to our resources…

Get ready to fill your reading list—we have plenty of learning materials to share this week. Read how to make Kafka faster with message compression, get prepared to implement Kafka in production with a new course, learn about Stateful Functions 3.3.0 in Flink, jump into four brand new Flink SQL tutorials, and more!

Apache Kafka® Resources:

• Learn how message compression works in Kafka, and how you can use it to improve throughput in this blog post by Lucia Cerchie and Dave Troiano.
• Looking for resources on how to implement Kafka in production? Check out Gilles Phillipart’s brand new course: Mastering Path to Production for Data Streaming Systems with Apache Kafka. Save the course cheat sheet to have tips from the course at hand.
• Build a Kafka reading list with 47 stories to learn about Kafka.
• kcat is a handy tool for simplifying Kafka interactions, and Sergio Marcial’s introductory article is a helpful resource to get started!
• In less than 10 minutes, learn how to consume Kafka messages using Flink and Java with Wade Waldron’s video.

Apache Flink® Resources:

• Stateful Functions 3.3.0 is now available! Read the release announcement and release notes, or check out the updated documentation.
• New Flink SQL tutorials: Learn how to split a stream of events, create tumbling windows, filter a stream of events, or find distinct values in a stream of events.
• Flink tidbits: Konstantin Knauf and Martijn Visser talk on how Kafka and Flink can work better together in a quick video. Plus, start debugging Flink with 2 steps from Nico Kruber that will help you identify the source of errors.
• Dataflow Programming with Apache Flink and Apache Kafka: Use Flink to build a Java pipeline that consumes clickstream data from Kafka in Wade Waldron’s latest blog post.
• Learn about the features of cloud-native Flink in the fourth and final installment of our Inside Flink blog series.

Terminal Tip of the Week:

When you're using kcat, it can be helpful to shorten your commands by combining single-letter flags.

For example, to consume from topic topicname in consumer mode, you could enter the t and C flags separately like this:

kcat -t topicname -C    

Or combine them like this:

kcat -Ct topicname   

Links From Around the Web:

• Discover the cosmos! Each day, NASA features a different image from around the universe with a brief explanation from a professional astronomer.
• Check out GenPiCam: a Raspberry Pi-based camera that reimagines the world with GenAI, by Simon Aubury. Bonus: pictures of Snowy the cat!
• Where in the USA is this? You have 5 guesses to figure it out.

In Other News:

• In-person meetup in Melbourne (Oct 10): Kafka Events and RESTful APIs - the best of both worlds!
• In-person meetup in Sydney (Oct 12): Building Kafka for High Availability - the non-functional stuff
• In-person meetup in Copenhagen (Oct 10): A Kafka Client’s Request: Or, There and Back Again

By the way…

We hope you enjoyed our curated assortment of resources! If you’d like to provide feedback, suggest ideas for content you’d like to see, or you want to submit your own resource for consideration, send us an email at devx_newsletter@confluent.io!

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P.S. If you want to learn more about Kafka or Confluent Cloud, visit our developer site at Confluent Developer.