‘Tis the season for lots of new resources! This week, we have an advent calendar from Confluent’s data streaming elves, a primer on PyFlink, the only guide you’ll need for producing messages with librdkafka, a roundup of the best free learning resources for Apache Kafka® beginners, and some quick and easy Apache Flink® learning. As always, we’re keeping you up to date with news on Kafka Summit London, Kafka Summit Bangalore, and Current.

With this edition, we’re signing off for 2023, and we’ll be back with lots more to share in 2024! Thank you for reading our newsletters this year, we hope they were helpful and entertaining. If you have any suggestions for what you’d like to see from us in 2024, please send your ideas to devx_newsletter@confluent.io. We’d love to hear from you.

Enjoy, and happy holidays to those celebrating!

Apache Kafka® Resources:

• librdkafka is the main client library used in non-JVM environments, with wrapper libraries for Python, .Net, Go, and a growing list of clients (take a look!). If you want to get hands-on with librdkafka, check out Jakub Korab's new extensive guide on producing messages with the library.
• Writing to and reading from Kafka looks simple on the surface, but under the covers, it is a complex process with a fascinating life cycle! Danica Fine’s talk at Berlin Buzzwords 2023 celebrates the journey.
• Kafka beginners, rejoice! There is a lot of beginner learning material to sift through, so Peter Moskovits shared his top 7 free learning resources for complete beginners to Kafka. This curated list of courses and tutorials should get you started on your way to building your first Kafka app.
• If you've found that your data streaming architecture has become complex with a number of siloed clusters, when does it make sense to consider centralizing to a single, or at least fewer, clusters? A new blog post from Lyndon Hedderly, Andrew Sellers, and Jon Vines helps you answer that and other questions about dealing with enterprise clusters.
• Ali Moradi introduced Mockafka-py, an open source Python library designed specifically for simulating Kafka in a testing environment.

Apache Flink® Resources:

• The Apache Flink community announced the second bug fix release of the 1.17 series, which includes 82 bug fixes and vulnerability fixes.
• Some low-time commitment learning: Danica Fine and David Moravek have two new LinkedIn videos on Flink! Learn what Flink’s adaptive scheduler actually does in this one-minute video, or hear about four different Flink APIs that provide varying levels of abstraction in less than two minutes.
• Joins work a bit differently when you’re streaming data. In their new video, David Anderson and Dan Weston discuss how and when to use temporal joins to combine your data.
• Making Flink serverless: Learn what serverless Flink architecture means for users in Konstantin Knauf’s new blog post, featuring a lightboard video from Kai Waehner explaining what Flink is.
• Get a primer on using PyFlink, the Python-based API for Flink and Kubernetes, from Gunnar Morling.

Terminal Tip of the Week:

kcat starts with a couple of defaults that are helpful to know about.

First of all, it automatically uses consumer mode:

❯ kcat -t topic_name
% Auto-selecting Consumer mode (use -P or -C to override)

If you want to run it in Producer mode, use -P, as indicated in the output.

Second, the default delimiter is newline:

kcat -t topic_name
% Auto-selecting Consumer mode (use -P or -C to override)
{"key":"value": ["string"]}
{"key":"value": ["string"]}

If you'd like to use a delimiter, add -K with your desired delimiter.

Links From Around the Web:

• Advent of Code is still ongoing through the rest of the holiday season!
• Learn about The architecture of today’s LLM applications.
• How does your code editor support handy features like code completion, syntax highlighting, and refactoring routines? Lucia Cerchie’s article gives a high-level explanation.
• How fast are you moving right now?

In Other News:

• The call for papers for Current 2024 is now open!! Submit your talk by February 26, 2024. The event will take place in Austin, Texas on September 17-18, 2024.
• The call for papers for Kafka Summit Bangalore is still open! Submit your abstract before Jan 10, 2024. If you’d like assistance with your abstract for KSB, join the office hours on the Confluent Community Slack on December 20 and January 8, 2024, at 08:00 - 09:00 IST each day.
• Registration to attend Kafka Summit London is now open! Registration for Kafka Summit Bangalore will open this month, and speaker notifications for KSL will be on Dec 19th! Sign up for updates on London or Bangalore to get notified of registration openings, speaker announcements, and other news.
• Join the Confluent Advent Calendar 2023! Confluent’s streaming elves are delivering weekly gifts containing daily content (special doors included) to your inbox! Surprises include the top free e-books on data streaming in 2023, video insights from industry experts, and more through December 24th.
• Jfokus Developers Conference 2024 will be in Stockholm from Feb 5th - 7th. Catch Danica Fine there giving a talk: Brick-by-Brick: Exploring the Elements of Apache Kafka.
• In-person meetup in Bangalore (Dec 23): Bangalore Streams

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.