Intro to Kafka

We're excited to host Cindy McMullen this month for an introductory talk about Apache Kafka and data streaming!

IMPORTANT: Please pre-register at https://introtokafkaforwomeninmachinel.splashthat.com/ (in addition to here on meetup). Twitter Boulder requires registration at that link for all events. In exchange, they have provided a beautiful space and snacks/drinks for the event!

Agenda:
6-6:15: arrive and chat
6:15-6:30: intros and announcements
6:30-7:15: Cindy's talk

Abstract
Apache Kafka is used to build real-time data pipelines and stream applications. At Oracle, we’re using Kafka in our Cloud Commerce architecture as the conduit to stream user interactions into our data analysis platform, where we’ll use machine learning algorithms to gain insight and create personalized recommendations for shoppers. Kafka is used not only as communication conduit and immediate streaming data source for notifications, but also serves as a longer-term storage system, enabling replay of those events to be consumed by any number of machine learning algorithms.

This talk will present a brief overview of Kafka, then dive into some more advanced features used to enable Kafka as that long-term storage subject to personalized information data restrictions: log compaction, topic partitioners, consumer/producer interceptors, and custom serializers.

About Cindy McMullen
Cindy has over 20 years of experience developing and delivering enterprise-level applications for personalization, content management, commerce, and social network graph analysis. She’s currently excited about software architecture and application development using machine learning, big data exploration and visualization, and large-scale streaming architectures for data pipelines. For fun, Cindy enjoys mountain biking, climbing, and skiing.