Greetings, readers! Any junior devs on a job hunt? In our third November edition, we’re bringing you a guide to the top 2023 Apache Kafka® interview questions for junior developers! You can also learn all about consumer group IDs with Lucia Cerchie in your choice of learning style: listen to her video or read her article. Plus, get the details on the release of Apache Flink® Kubernetes Operator 1.7.0 and a new CLI plugin for Flink SQL. Let’s dive in!

Apache Kafka® Resources:

• Get an introduction to consumer group IDs in less than five minutes in Lucia Cerchie’s new video, or read her blog post on the same topic.
• If you’re a junior-level Kafka developer on a search for your next role, prep for interviews with Lucia’s Top Apache Kafka® Interview Questions for Juniors In 2023.
• Find yourself in need of mock data to test out your app or pipeline? Check out the generate complex streams of test data tutorial for hands-on code examples.
• Valérie Servaire and Damien Fayet from Michelin announced a new open source tool for Kafka, kstreamplify, a Java library that provides features on top of Kafka Streams, such as properties injection and error handling. For more details, read their announcement blog post.
• How do you provide personalized search results to online shoppers when their query is broad and the result set is large? Matthias Broecheler’s new blog post walks through how to use LLMs with Kafka, Flink, PostgreSQL, GraphQL, and DataSQRL to build a personalized search with vector embeddings.

Apache Flink® Resources:

• The Apache Flink community announced the release of Flink Kubernetes Operator 1.7.0!
• There’s a new CLI plugin for Flink SQL that gets you set up with one command!
• Check out Andreas Wombacher’s post on Linkedin where he shares a sketch of a Flink development environment that supports inline debugging during data pipeline execution and some key takeaways.

Terminal Tip of the Week:

Did you know you can use the Confluent CLI to store your API keys? That way you can run subsequent commands against the cluster you specify with the key and you don't have to add it every time. This limits exposure.

Here's how you'd set that up:

confluent api-key use <api-key> --resource <resource-id>

Links From Around the Web:

• Advent of Code, an advent calendar of small programming puzzles, kicks off again for 2023 on December 1!
• Take a virtual tour of Internet Artifacts
• Comic by Mart Virkus: If Programming Languages Were Games

In Other News:

• Don’t forget to submit your abstracts for Kafka Summit Bangalore! The Call for Papers closes January 10th. The next speaker office hours on the Confluent Community Slack will be on December 20 and January 8 from 08:00 - 09:00 IST each day.
• Thanks for your response to the Kafka Summit London CfP! It's now closed, and the Program Committee will get to work reviewing your excellent submissions.
• The Open Source Analytics Conference (OSA CON) 2023, a free online conference for all things open-source analytics, will take place from Dec 12 - 14. Confluent co-founder Jun Rao will give a talk on re-inventing Kafka in the data streaming era on day one.
• You can now watch sessions from the 2023 Open Source Data Summit on demand, including panels on the role of open source technology in today's data architectures and contributing to open source projects.
• In-person meetup in Hong Kong (Dec 5): Real-time push notifications based on user browsing habits over ksqlDB
• In-person meetup in Sydney (Dec 14): Data Contracts: How to ensure the consistency, reliability, and quality of streaming data
• In-person meetup in Milan (Dec 14): Lo streaming ai tempi dell'AI

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!

If you’d like to view previous editions of the newsletter, visit our archive.

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