Well folks, we hope this April is turning out to be a gentle one for you all, with no allergy attacks, whether you’re in the midst of spring or fall. We’ve got a solid roundup of resources today, with some new demos to try, an OCTO-log post on data contracts, and a couple of snappy Kafka terminal aliases. Enjoy!

Apache Kafka® Resources:

• First on the menu… a refreshed suite of demos for you! There’s a good range here – you can use these demos to cement the foundational concepts of Kafka in your learning path, or you can use the more advanced ones to evaluate the business value of adding Kafka to your data pipelines. We also found some ready-to-use sources of real-world real-time data to power your own demos and explorations.

• Uniting the Machine Learning and Data Streaming Ecosystems: Pt 1 This first installment in a series by Robbie Palmer looks at the state of these two ecosystems, and the associated barriers and opportunities in their overlap.

• The latest from the OCTO-log: Jack Vanlightly explores the depth of the concept of data contracts for tech organizations.

• Unknown Magic Byte! If this error ever struck terror into your heart, read on…

Terminal Tip of the Week:

Today’s tip is about aliases that make it a lot easier to work with Kafka. They come from our community member Neil Buesing, who has also written a blog post touching on the topic. The first alias saves you from having to type out the bootstrap server options every time, and it also makes sure that the output is printed in bytes:

alias kcc='kafka-console-consumer \
        --bootstrap-server localhost:19092 \
        --key-deserializer=org.apache.kafka.common.serialization.BytesDeserializer  \
        --property print.key=true \
        --property key.separator="|" \
        --from-beginning \
        --topic'

The second alias saves you the work of typing out the bootstrap server options when you’re working with a local container deployment of kafka:

alias kt='kafka-topics --bootstrap-server localhost:19092,localhost:29092,localhost:39092'

Links From Around the Web:

• The Philosophize This! podcast gives entertaining, high-level summaries of various philosopher’s contributions to the world.

• You’ve heard of failing DNS errors taking down massively popular websites for hours. Maybe you know exactly what that entails and you’d like to practice with DNS to avoid similar scenarios, or maybe you just want to learn what the heck DNS is. Mess With DNS is a cool resource from Julia Evans that can meet your needs.

• You’ve heard of Wordle, but can you guess a word using… semantics?

In Other News:

Kafka Summit London is happening soon, May 16-17! Register at the conference home page.

Join Kafka developers in-person for a meetup in Atlanta! Other upcoming opportunities to network and learn are

• In Person in London on Kafka Streams in FinTech & Microservices KStreams accelerator
• Join us virtually for a chat on Apache Kafka and Azure Connectors with a hands on workshop

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