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Explaining How Kafka Works With Robin Moffatt

In this episode of Cocktails, we talk to a senior developer advocate from Confluent about Apache Kafka, the advantages that Kafka’s distributed pub-sub model offers, how an event processing model for integration can address the issues associated with traditional static datastores, and the future of the event streaming space.

EPISODE OUTLINE

  • Robin Moffat tells us what he does as a Senior Development Advocate at Confluent.
  • We learn what Kafka offers as a distributed, pub-sub model and its advantages over the traditional request-response model.
  • We find out ksqlDB’s role as a database on top of Kafka and what sets it apart from other databases. 
  • How do you facilitate a microservices architecture via event-processing?
  • What does the future look like for event-streaming?

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From Behind the Chair to Behind the Keyboard: How Hairdressing Prepared Me for Network Automation

Every developer lead has been there. You’re mid-phone call with a client who is experiencing an outage or chaos in the system. She’s stressed out, balancing feedback from stakeholders across her organization, weighing the potential impacts of the issue, and relying on you for advice and solutions.

In these pivotal moments, I’m often hit with a sudden sense of déjà vu from when I was 16, working as a hairdresser in my first full-time job, facing a customer whose hair color was left on too long and oxidizing, causing the microscopic outer layer of hair follicles to peel back and release green color pigments.

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What is Developer Relations and What are Common Roles?

Developer Relations is not simply a role or department at API-first companies. Developer relations is a mindset of getting developers adopt a platform and making them successful with their initiatives rather than attempting to sell to those developers. This makes developer relations different from traditional sales and marketing roles. However, if you ask “What is Developer Relations?”, you may get many ambiguous responses as developer relations is a catch all phrase for a variety of different roles and titles. Some titles include “Developer Advocate” and Developer Evangelist”, but can also include other newer titles like “Developer Experience Manager.”These roles vary company to company and even across teams within a company.

This post outlines some of the different roles within devrel, such as:

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I’m Now a Developer Advocate at Google!

After more than four years at Google, I'm now a Developer Advocate! "Wait, I thought you already were that?" is the most common reaction. Allow me to tell my story.

How the Google Journey Began

Google recruiters had reached out to me over the years, and in August 2014 — if my memory serves me right — they queried about my interest in becoming a Developer Advocate for the Web at Google. I expressed my interest and we started Google's detailed and granular assessment and hiring process. In my first call with HR, though, they informed me that this role was full-time in London. Not having an interest, nor possibility, to move to London, I said that I couldn't relocate but I would be happy to travel there every second week and work there then. I was met with "Unfortunately that's not going to work out; you have to be based in the London office full-time."

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How Content Creates Content

A big part of many developer advocacy programs is content. Content can be in the form of tutorials, blog posts, videos, and hands-on workshops and other forms. Coming up with content ideas is not always easy. In this blog post, I'm going to share some ideas how to simplify content creation.

The IBM Developer SF team hosts weekly events. We host at least one in-person event and one online event (webinar/online meetup). For every in-person workshop, we host an online event. It's usually best to host the online event after the in-person event, as people who couldn't make the in-person event can watch the online version (but the other way is also fine). The in-person event is about two hours and the online event is usually 40 minutes. So yes, the content covered will be different, but the basis will be the same. This is the first example where doing a hands-on workshop easily creates content for an online event. The in-person event doesn't necessarily need to be a meetup/workshop-type event. It can also be a conference talk, a panel, or a Q&A. It can really be anything.