Hello everyone! This week we have a long list of resources for you to kick off your autumn (or Spring, for our Southern Hemisphere readers!) Optimize throughput with a blog post on how to tune your Kafka Connect source connectors, spin up a local Kafka deployment with a new quick start, get an in-depth introduction to Flink SQL, and much more. Happy learning!

Apache Kafka® Resources:

• How to Tune Kafka Connect Source Connectors to Optimize Throughput: Read Catalin Pop’s new blog post to learn the best ways to tune your source connectors.
• Versioned State Stores were introduced to Kafka Streams in Apache Kafka 3.5. Learn what they are and how you might use them in Victoria Xia’s blog post.
• The FINOS Open Source in Finance Podcast sat down with Anna McDonald and chatted about Kafka Streams, Morphir, Open Regulation, and coding at 5 years old! Listen here.
• Spin up a local Kafka deployment using only the Confluent CLI with the new quick start page on Confluent Developer.
• If you’re navigating the transition from ZooKeeper to KRaft, the Confluent Docs team has you covered! Get an overview of KRaft, learn how to configure KRaft in production, or migrate your metadata. The docs now also show instructions for ZooKeeper mode and KRaft mode.
• Confluent Platform 7.5 is now available!

Apache Flink® Resources:

• New Flink reads: Learn about the three main categories of stream processing use cases for Flink in a new blog post from Jean-Sébastien Brunner, or get started with Flink SQL in Martijn Visser’s new introductory guide.
• Flink tidbits: Hear some quick insights on whats to come with serverless Flink from Jean-Sébastien Brunner and Martijn Visser. Nico Gruber covers some of the most common misconceptions about working with Flink in this bite-sized video.

Terminal Tip of the Week:

Today we're going to talk about the different ways to configure kcat.

First of all, one of the reasons that kcat is so useful is that any piece of librdkafka configuration is available to it via the -X flag:

kcat -b broker_name -t topic_name -X client.id=rdkafka

If you've got a lot of configuration and don't want to be passing them in every time you run the command, you can feed kcat a config file:

kcat -b broker_name -t topic_name -X client -F ./path/to/config_file

If there's no config file set, kcat will consult $KCAT_CONFIG or, if you like, you can set configuration in a ~/.config/kcat.conf file to avoid passing in any config values at all.

Links From Around the Web:

• What Would Marco Polo Think of WebSockets? Find out in this article from Muhammed Kadir Tan.
• Fold a paper until you reach the moon.
• Relax and create some unique generative art with Tinkersynth.

In Other News:

• It’s almost time for Current 2023 (Sept 26-27)! If you’re attending in person, we look forward to seeing you there! Check out Danica Fine’s tweets for guidance on crafting your personal agenda by skill level and technology. If you can’t make it in person, you can still register for a Streaming Pass to watch the keynote and a track of sessions.
• In-Person Meetup in Vienna (Sept 26): Thinking in Events/Kafka and System of Records
• In-Person Meetup in Frankfurt (Sept 26): Simplifying data pipelines with Apache Flink® Stream Processing for Apache Kafka®
• In-Person Meetup in Munich (Oct 4): Building a Scalable Analytics Application With Real-Time PS4 F1 Data
• In-Person Meetup in Sydney (Oct 12): Building Kafka for High Availability - the non-functional stuff/Lessons learnt from operating Apache Kafka clusters at Scale at IBM

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.