IN-PERSON: Data Streaming Meetup

Join us for an Apache Flink® x Apache Kafka® meetup in San Francisco hosted by meshIQ!

📍Venue:
Room 202
AMA Conference Center inside San Francisco Marriott Marquis
780 Mission Street, Blue Elevators, 2nd Level
San Francisco, CA 94103 415-442-6770

Specific Instructions
• We are located on the 2nd Level inside the San Francisco Marriott Marquis
• Enter the hotel from either the Valet Drive on Mission Street or from the Fourth Street entrance.
• Walk to the BLUE ELEVATORS, which are located BEHIND the PINK and YELLOW elevator banks.
• Take the BLUE ELEVATORS to the 2nd floor.
• When you step out of the elevator bank on the second floor, make a left.
• AMA's San Francisco Executive Conference Center will be located just down the hall on your left.
OR
• Once you are in the lobby, take the escalator to the second level and follow the arrows below.

🗓 Agenda:

• 5:30pm - 6:00pm: Doors Open/Networking
• 6:00pm - 6:30pm: Elijah Meeks, Principal Engineer I, Confluent
• 6:30pm - 7:00pm: JB Onofre, Director of the ASF & leads OSPO at Dremio
• 7:00pm - 8:00pm: Additional Q&A, Networking

💡First Speaker:
Elijah Meeks, Principal Engineer I, Confluent

Title of Talk:
How Apache Flink Democratizes Streaming Data Processing

Abstract:
Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink brings real-time stream processing to anyone comfortable with SQL. You don’t need deep stream processing expertise to turn streaming data into useful, continuously updated data products but that can still be hard to grasp until you see it.

In this talk, I’ll walk through what Confluent Flink makes possible today, from practical streaming analytics to anomaly detection on live streams to materializing results as Iceberg or Delta Lake tables with Tableflow. We’ll cover the core ideas, then make them concrete with live examples in Semiotic 3, a visualization library built for streaming data.
No deep Flink background required—just working SQL knowledge and some curiosity about what real-time systems can actually do.

Bio:
Elijah Meeks is a leading voice in data visualization, with a career spanning both academia and tech. He is currently a Principal Engineer at Confluent, where he focuses on data visualization for real-time streaming data. Previously, he co-founded Noteable, a startup dedicated to advancing data analysis and communication, and was the founding Executive Director of the Data Visualization Society. His experience also includes pioneering data visualization applications at Netflix and Apple, including the development of the charting library Semiotic.

Before his time in tech, he worked in the digital humanities at Stanford University, where he served as the technical lead for major projects like ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World. He is also the author of [D3.js](http://d3.js/) in Action, now in its third edition. His broad background allows him to speak with deep expertise on the evolution of data visualization, from its foundational principles to its most current applications in industry.

💡 Speaker Two:
JB Onofre, Director of the ASF & leads OSPO at Dremio

Title of Talk:
Harnessing Apache ActiveMQ and Apache Kafka
Abstract:
As modern architectures shift toward microservices and real-time data processing, the demand for reliable messaging has never been higher. While often viewed as competitors, Apache ActiveMQ and Apache Kafka serve fundamentally different roles in the enterprise ecosystem. One excels at complex integration patterns and "once-and-only-once" delivery, while the other is a powerhouse for high-throughput stream processing and historical data replay.
This talk explores the strategic synergy between these two titans. We will dive into:
* Core Architectural Divergence: Understanding the "Smart Broker" (ActiveMQ) vs. the "Dumb Broker/Smart Consumer" (Kafka) models.
* Use Case Optimization: Identifying when to use ActiveMQ for traditional enterprise application integration (EAI) and when to pivot to Kafka for event-driven streaming.
* The Hybrid Approach: Real-world patterns for integrating both systems to handle transactional workflows alongside massive data pipelines.
* Performance & Scalability: A pragmatic look at how each handles backpressure, persistence, and horizontal scaling.

Bio:
JB is Director of the ASF, PMC member on ~ 20 Apache projects. He also leads the OSPO at Dremio.