Open Source Europe Tour - Berlin, Germany
Details
PLEASE RSVP HERE: https://luma.com/x1h3sb59
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Registrations: 5:30 PM - 6:15 PM (food & drinks are taken care of)
The event will also include a networking break between the talks.
This event is kindly hosted at the offices of our partner, Netlight Consulting.
Will Martin
AI Evangelist at Dremio & Author of the upcoming AI for Dummies (and actually)
AI is everywhere — but what does it actually mean in practice?
Will will give a practical, hype-free walkthrough of modern AI and how it fits into today’s data stack and lakehouse architectures.
🚀 Topics include:
- What Agentic AI is — and how it differs from LLMs
- How LLMs work under the hood
- Fine-tuning vs RAG vs prompt engineering
- Connecting AI to your data, APIs, and lakehouse with MCP
- Real-world benefits, risks, and implementation considerations
A clear introduction to how AI really works — and how to use it effectively.
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## Olena Kutsenko
Staff Developer Advocate, Confluent
Olena will explore what it really takes to move data from Kafka into Apache Iceberg tables reliably and at scale.
🔍 Topics include:
- Schema evolution & data normalization
- Exactly-once guarantees & late-arriving events
- Partitioning & table maintenance
- Trade-offs between Kafka Connect, Flink pipelines, and custom ingestion approaches
Using Confluent Tableflow as a practical example, this session focuses on building robust streaming-to-lakehouse architectures — regardless of tooling.
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## Bjarne Schröder
Software Engineer, STACKIT
We're excited to welcome Bjarne from STACKIT, where he works on Data & AI product offerings.
Having transitioned from Data Engineering to Software Engineering, Bjarne brings experience from both perspectives of the data ecosystem—first as a user of cloud-native data services and now as someone who helps build and deliver them.
Passionate about connecting with people and exploring technology, Bjarne enjoys diving into all kinds of nerdy topics in his free time and cycling around his hometown of Cologne, Germany.
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## Andrew Madson
Head of Developer Relations, Fivetran
Andrew has spent more than a decade leading analytics and ML teams across organizations including J.P. Morgan Chase, MassMutual, and Arizona State University before moving into DevRel and developer community leadership.
He is:
- Founding Head of DevRel at Fivetran
- Co-author of Apache Polaris: The Definitive Guide
- Speaker, educator, and creator with a 250K+ global audience
- A leading voice in Apache Iceberg, lakehouses, and AI-ready data platforms
Expect practical insights on modern data infrastructure, developer ecosystems, and building AI-ready architectures.
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## Alex Merced
Head of DevRel at Dremio & O’Reilly Author
Alex will walk through key ideas from his latest work on Agentic Analytics and building data platforms that actually work for AI.
🔍 What to expect:
- Why data silos break AI agents
- The role of the lakehouse, federation & semantic layers
- Apache Iceberg, open catalogs & modern architectures
- Why AI agents need context — not just data
- A roadmap toward autonomous, AI-driven analytics
A sharp, architecture-focused session connecting modern data platforms with the future of AI.