Why I'm Going to Current 2024

First, a full disclosure: I work at Confluent, the company that hosts Current. So yeah, I’m interested in going. ;)

But I also have personal reasons for attending.

I’m in the data biz, for better or for worse. I’ve always been interested in the formats human beings use to turn information into a resource. I used a small but data-driven approach to teaching back in the day, and it showed up in my students’ improved test scores. This interest is part of what got me my first job in tech at StepZen, working with GraphQL. I love data, and the developers that collect and share it. Naturally, streaming data (Apache Kafka® and Apache Flink®) fascinates me too.

Of course, there are plenty of online resources on this stuff. The team I work on provides Confluent Developer - if you’d like to take a course, tap in to the community forum, or walk through a tutorial. (That’s scratching the surface of Confluent Developer, I can genuinely recommend it to budding data streaming enthusiasts). There's also the official Kafka and Flink websites. Of course, there are plenty of online resources on this stuff. The team I work on provides Confluent Developer - if you’d like to take a course, tap in to the community forum, or walk through a tutorial. (That’s scratching the surface of Confluent Developer, I can genuinely recommend it to budding data streaming enthusiasts). There's also the official Kafka and Flink websites, for info straight from the source.

And I have lots of reasons for basing much of my own learning in a remote environment, paramount among them is the fact that I can consume more content and create more code while I’m curled up on my couch with lighting and temperature that I control.

But sometimes there’s a reason to override the comfort zone and get out there. I like to think along the lines of Austin Kleon, who celebrates something called a ‘scenius’. It’s the healthy exchange of ideas within a community that results in innovation. In his words, “Genius is an egosystem, scenius is an ecosystem.”

If there’s a “scenius” for data streaming, it’s certainly at Current! The speaker list includes top contributors to both the Apache Kafka and Apache Flink projects, engineers who have streamed hundreds of millions of messages in production, and entrepreneurs who are at the forefront of developing solutions to complex business problems.

All of these speakers, plus the attendees, are people with individual viewpoints on data and a passion for problem-solving, and that’s what draws me to Current. Sometimes I think of new ideas as diamonds: each facet represents the perspective of a single person’s contribution. Together, something truly new comes into being.

Want to dip into the “scenius” with me? Come see us in Austin Sep 17-18 ‘24!