Visualization of Events & Lessons from the Trenches (with CodeCrafts raffle)

Hello everyone,
Ready to tackle the complexities of modern distributed systems? This meetup dives into crucial aspects: understanding event flows in Kafka and learning hard-won lessons from scaling large systems.

📅 Agenda
🔹 17:00 Open doors
🔹 17:30 Marlon Alagoda - Taming the Kafka Flow: Visualizing Microservice Events with AsyncAPI & EventCatalog
🌀 Kafka is at the heart of many modern event-driven architectures, but managing and understanding event flows can be challenging. In this talk, Marlon will show how AsyncAPI and EventCatalog help visualize and document microservice event flows, making them more accessible and maintainable.

🔹18:30 David Leitner - From Pain to Patterns: Lessons from a Decade of Distributed Systems at Scale
🔥 Building distributed systems comes with unique challenges. David will share hard-earned lessons, common pitfalls, and proven patterns from years of experience designing large-scale systems.

🔹 19:30 Raffle of a ticket for the CodeCrafts happening on the May 22nd in Vienna 🎉
🔹Afterwards get Together with food & drinks sponsored by SQUER🍻

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And this is what Marlon and David are saying about their talks:

Marlon Alagoda - Taming the Kafka Flow: Visualizing Microservice Events with AsyncAPI & EventCatalog
This talk explores how our team, developing software in the public sector, tackled the growing complexity of tracking event flows within our 14 Kotlin microservices communicating via Kafka. We faced significant challenges understanding producer/consumer relationships, impacting both developers and business stakeholders. To regain clarity, we adopted AsyncAPI for standardized event documentation and EventCatalog for interactive visualization. Key to our success was developing custom tooling to automatically generate AsyncAPI specifications directly from our Kotlin services. Ultimately, this approach provided a clear, living map of our event-driven architecture, dramatically improving system understanding and collaboration across all roles.

David Leitner - From Pain to Patterns: Lessons from a Decade of Distributed Systems at Scale
Today’s software seems to be unavoidably distributed — and expected to be unfazed by scale. In just twenty years, the average reach of our systems usually exceeds what the entire internet once served. I was fortunate enough to be part of projects where this trend became painfully obvious: frequent failures, midnight wake-up calls caused by corrupted databases, and endless tracing sessions spent trying to unravel inconsistencies.

It became clear that we needed new ways to organize, craft, and reason about systems that constantly live in the space between chaos and complexity. And yes, we made our share of mistakes — which taught us a lot, probably more than we bargained for.

This talk is about those lessons: the painful ones, the surprising ones, and the patterns that only emerged after everything broke.
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The location, food, and drinks are sponsored by SQUER (https://www.squer.io/) . Who is SQUER? SQUER are coding architects, software engineers, agile transformation experts and cloud engineers, all striving towards one goal. Solve their customer's challenges on the customer's way to holistic digitalization while profoundly understanding their business and constraints.

👉 RSVP now and be part of the discussion!
Space is limited, so please register if you want to come. As always, we're very much looking forward to seeing you!

Best regards,
Daniel and Gottfried