In Person at All Things Open (Raleigh USA 2023)
After “attending” and speaking at All Things Open virtually for several years (Zero-Code Streaming Data Pipeline Using Open Source Technologies 2021, A Visual Introduction to Apache Kafka Open Source 101 2022, and an accepted 1/2 day workshop on Apache Kafka at ATO 2022) I finally made it in person this year!
Downtown Raleigh USA (via Halifax for Community over Code 2023) is a long trip from Canberra, Australia, but I was excited to attend and present in person, and catch up with some old and new NetApp and Instaclustr colleagues as an extra bonus (we had a booth, were a Gold sponsor, sponsored the sticker table, and had a couple of talks). It’s a big conference held in the downtown convention centre, according to the ATO summary blog there were 4,327 attendees — wow!
I was pleased to present my talk “Spinning your Drones with Cadence Workflows, Apache Kafka, and TensorFlow” (PDF) as the final DevOps track talk on Tuesday, in 1/3 of the ballroom — it was massive, with a giant big screen — I wish I had taken a micro drone to fly around as part of my talk.
Thanks to Mekka Williams for the photo:
If you would like to try out any of the technologies from the talk (and more), we have an ATO special 30 day trial listed in the ATO swag bag. And the final part of the blog series that the talk was based was just published on our website (with links to previous parts). (There was also another talk on orchestration and choreography that looked interesting by Rain Leander; and Rich Bowen gave his talk at the same time as mine! — Luckily I heard it at Community over Code Beijing — it’s great!)
What else did I find interesting? Here are some of the best (most interesting at least) technical talks that I attended:
Deconstructing Compute-Storage Separation: A Hip-Hop Producer’s Guide to Data Management — Joshua Alphonse (A 2 for 1 talk) — What does compute-strorage sepration and hip-hop music production have in common? Let’s find out!
A great talk from Joshua Alphonse using the analogy of Hip Hop to explain compute-data architectures (I reference Hip Hop dancing in my talk too)!
Peter Farkas had a great talk on FerretDB explaining the background to SQL standardization and why there’s a need for JSON query open standardization and open source implementations in his talk “Moving MongoDB workloads to Postgres with FerretDB”. And being from a Performance Engineering background I found the benchmarking results encouraging.
Disclosure: I’ve written about FerretDB!
Becoming a More Persuasive Open-Source Contributor or Developer Advocate — Brad Topol
Interesting talk on how to measure the success of DevRel activities, and work with marketing people too. Thanks Brad Topol for the tips.
And leaving the best to last, a great illustrated story (fairy tale!) about the progress so far (it’s an ongoing story) with synergies between Instaclustr and NetApp in Open Source “Open Source Stories: Beginnings — Sharan Foga”.
Disclosure: I work with Sharan Foga in Instaclustr’s DevRel team :-)
I had just come from attending Community Over Code in Halifax, so it was great to see some overlap with talks on Apache technologies including Apache Beam, Apache Airflow, Apache Tomcat, Apache Pinot, Apache Cassandra, and Apache Kafka (mine).
There were lots of vendor booths, including this one from YottaDB which had a working demo with CO2 and motion sensors — it also has a screen (not shown) which displays when a new visitor is detected.
I thought this was cool, as my colleague Kassian Rosner Wren built a similar physical demo cluster recently for Apache Cassandra and Apache Kafka!
Some more random photos from the event…
Walking to the event on the 1st day I came across an incredible science museum! The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences is an amazing world class science museum which is a cross between a natural history museum, a zoo, and a hands on science museum — it has everything (even huge whale skeletons)! I really liked the unique hands on section where you could touch just about everything from stuffed animals (birds, bears, and wolf pelts event) to shells and rocks etc — I guess a similar reason to why our new demo cluster is such a great attractor and discussion starter — it’s hard to beat being able to get up close and personal with real artefacts!
