Greetings, developers! This week’s roundup of deep dives and hot takes includes an article on GPT-4 and streaming data, a Twitter thread on Apache Flink® vs. ksqlDB, and another great newsletter to subscribe to if you want to microdose Kafka knowledge. A note: as always, we appreciate community contributions to this newsletter! If you’ve got content you’d love to promote here, please let us know by emailing info@confluent.io!

Apache Kafka® Resources:

• Yes folks, we’re promoting another newsletter within our newsletter… it’s newsletter-ception. Stanislav Kozlovski, an Apache Kafka community member, has a new resource for you: 2 Minute Streaming. It introduces a new Kafka tidbit every week!
• GPT-4 + Streaming Data: Confluent Principal Technologist, Michael Drogalis, illustrates the business potential of combining the power of LLMs with real-time data. He says, “Large language models have changed the relationship between data engineering and model creation.” How? Read on.
• The Apache Kafka ecosystem is magnificent... and large. Luckily, the community maintains a list of ecosystem services for your convenience.

Apache Flink® Resources:

• Weighing the pros and cons of Apache Flink® vs ksqlDB can be a complex process. Jeff Bean wrote a Twitter thread inspired by real-life questions he fielded at Kafka Summit London’s Ask The Experts table to help you out.
• Why does Apache Flink need watermarks for event time processing? David Anderson provides a scholarly answer to this question on StackOverflow.
• Where is Flink going in the future? Consult the official roadmap.

Terminal Tip of the Week:

Did you know that when you use kcat without a -p flag you'll consume from all available partitions?

❯ kcat -C -b mybroker -t topic_name
% Reached end of topic topic_name [0] at offset 8378
% Reached end of topic topic_name [2] at offset 7959
% Reached end of topic topic_name [3] at offset 7523
% Reached end of topic topic_name [5] at offset 9261
% Reached end of topic topic_name [4] at offset 9137

What if you wanted to only consume from one partition? The -p flag comes in handy:

❯ kcat -C -b mybroker -t topic_name -p 2
% Reached end of topic topic_name [2] at offset 7959

Links From Around the Web:

• Early computer art from the 50’s and 60’s
• Take a trip to space with the space elevator!
• Bees can learn, remember, and… make decisions?

In Other News:

Apache Kafka 3.5 is now available!

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.