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The Confluent DevX Newsletter

March Roundup of Kafka Resources, Pi, and other Concerns 🥧

March 23rd, 2023

Hello everyone and welcome to our second edition of the Confluent DevX Newsletter! If you happen to live in participating states in the U.S., we hope daylight savings wasn’t too rough. Wherever you live, we hope that your Pi Day was filled with mathematical joy. We’ve got all sorts of goodies this week ranging from Apache Kafka® migration tips to animals crocheted with patterns devised by ChatGPT. So let’s dive in…

Kafka Resources:

Terminal Tip of the Week:

You might have heard of the jq utility to transform JSON data, but what about XML? Enter python-yq. Installing it allows you to use xq, which formats XML to JSON like so:

curl --show-error --silent \
https://tfl.gov.uk/tfl/syndication/feeds/cycle-hire/livecyclehireupdates.xml \
| xq -c '.stations.station[] + {lastUpdate: .stations."@lastUpdate"}'

Result:

{"id":"850","name":"Brandon Street, Walworth","terminalName":"300060","lat":"51.489102","long":"-0.0915489", [...] "lastUpdate":"1677702601270"}

Here you see that bicycle rental data, expressed as XML, is transformed into JSON objects by the xq utility. Neat!

In Other News:

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

We hope you enjoyed our curated assortment of resources! If you’d like to provide feedback on what type of content you’d like to see, or you want to submit your own resource for consideration, send us an email at info@confluent.io!

If you’d like to view previous editions of the newsletter, visit Confluent Developer. P.S. If you want to learn more about Kafka or Confluent Cloud, visit our developer site at Confluent Developer.

Introducing the Confluent DevX Newsletter 🎉

March 9th, 2023

Welcome to our inaugural edition of “Confluent DevX Newsletter”! We’ll share many types of content in this newsletter, including: Kafka-related content from the community, tips and tricks for managing Apache Kafka® projects in your terminal, and links to fun nerdy content from around the broader web.

Kafka Resources:

  • Streaming Audio podcasts this week: Real-Time Data Transformations and Analytics with dbt Labs We loved what Amy said about developer experience!
  • 🦙Alpacas! And Kafka 3.4! Watch Danica (and tons of cute alpacas) explain what’s new.
  • Blog posts: Windowing in Kafka Streams – Windows, they roll, they tumble, they slide… and then there are session windows! See our blog post for more on what distinguishes these types of windows from each other.
  • Kafka for Python Developers. Recently, a course on Kafka for Python Developers was released to Confluent Developer. We highly recommend it if you’re familiar with Python and itching to try Kafka!
  • Read the OCTOlog for in-depth analysis of those data streaming opinions you hold near and dear! Ben Stopford begins by analyzing the nature of opinion itself.

Terminal Tip of the Week:

To view the output of a command in bytes, use a pipe and ‘hexdump.’ For example, if I were to want the output of viewing a topic using kcat to be in bytes, I’d type:

❯ kcat -Ct purchases -c1 | hexdump

0000000 0000 8601 00a1 0308 0612 7567 7469 7261

In Other News:

  • The Current 2023 CFP (Call For Papers) is open! 🎉 We are looking forward to your thoughtful submissions. If you’re looking for feedback, we have office hours available in the #speakers-office-hours channel in the Confluent Community Slack.
  • We enjoyed this blog post by Confluent Community Catalyst Olena Kutsenko on ways to balance your data across Apache Kafka partitions
  • Kafka Summit London is happening soon, May 16-17! Register at the conference home page.

By the way…

We hope you enjoyed our curated assortment of resources! If you’d like to provide feedback on what type of content you’d like to see, or you want to submit your own resource for consideration, send us an email at info@confluent.io!

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

Confluent Cloud is a fully managed Apache Kafka service available on all three major clouds. Try it for free today.

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