Airflow Summit 2022 — The Best Of

Jarek Potiuk
Apache Airflow
Published in
7 min readJun 16, 2022

The Airflow Summit has a very special place in my heart. I hope I can share my sentiment here with whoever reads that, and by the end of the post you will know why I think that Airflow Summit is a fantastic community building and learning opportunity that you might also make very good use of.

Why community conferences are special

I would say I am a long-time veteran of helping to build the community through events. The “virus” of conference organizing has been caught from Wojtek — one of the Polish Autumn foggy days in 2013. I am eternally grateful for his “Hey, let’s make a conference on Mobile — I even have a good name Mobile Central Europe” that he casually teased me with. This was literally the founding moment of the MCE conference which we ran for 5 years at Polidea and which grew from 300 to 600 participants, got numerous workshops, after-parties and became one of the most important international events in mobile space.

Every single event I organized was different. For example, the last MCE event ended up with Robots and VR connected! — with the involvement of NoMagic.ai where I worked then as a robotics engineer (and the coolest part was that I programmed the robot to play it). And while organizing such a big conference is truly exhausting (people often told I looked like a zombie in the weeks before every single MCE conference), it was one of the best things in my community building experiences and I strongly believe you cannot build a strong community without having a good, strong event.

When we decided to stop MCE, that left a huge void in my heart. That was a good decision to stop it (mobile was not as community driven any more at that time), but I’ve felt that something was missing. In the meantime I started to be active (that’s a little understatement though) in the Apache Airflow community. That’s why when Aizhamal wrote on the devlist “Hey let’s make a conference about Airflow ” (coincidentally, it was another foggy day in November 2019), you can imagine what happened next.

The Airflow Summit

Fast-forward to three years later — we are now a few weeks after the 3rd Airflow Summit 2022. And this year, the Summit was also different than the two previous editions. It was an amazing, truly global and distributed event — more than 7000 online participants, more than 430 people attending local events (and actually having after-parties together!) all over the world at all continents — San Francisco, Seattle , New York, São Paulo, Lagos, London, Paris, Warsaw, Tel-Aviv, Bengaluru, Tokyo, Melbourne, Sydney and numerous watch-parties all over the world.

I could write a lot about how cool it is to work with the amazing group of people who organized it together (you all rock!), or to praise Software Guru — our event producers, who are hands-down the best community-focused event organizers I worked with over the many years, or to write how cool it is to get back to meet people at physical events (I managed to be at both London and Warsaw ones) after two years of the pandemics!

But not today — those stories might still come, but today I wanted to share with you the best things you can learn by watching the talks from the Airflow Summit 2020. And if you trust my judgment, I added a short one-sentence statement of learnings you can get by doing it for each of the talks I picked. I put them in the context of the Airflow 2022 video playlist — and you are of course most welcome to watch also those that I did not mention :)

Enough of the intro, it’s not what you came here for.

The learnings from Airflow Summit 2022 !

While preparing this post I realized there are a couple of recurring themes you could see in the Airflow Community. Some of them are because we engineered (yeah! organizing a conference is very much about engineering the experience, if you did not know that) the conference topics, but the actual themes were brought there by our amazing speakers.

How Airflow works

Make the best use of Airflow

Data observability

Engineering practices in your data pipelines

Managing your Airflow at scale and choosing how to deploy it

How Airflow and generally Open Source Community is great to learn and grow

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