​​Kafka Summit London 2023: Level Up Your Kafka Experience!

Hi there, it’s me, Danica Fine, your friendly neighborhood Kafka Summit London Program Committee Chair. Kafka Summit London 2023 is in just over two weeks, and I’ll be joining our incredible community members at the ExCeL in London to talk all things Apache Kafka® over two jam-packed days.

At Kafka Summit, you have your pick between community-hosted meetups, easy-to-consume 10-minute lightning talks, 40-minute technical breakout sessions, panels, and more. Our talented Program Committee worked tirelessly to review sessions and assemble one of the best Kafka Summit agendas yet.

Not sure what talks to attend? With five session tracks running simultaneously, it can be tough to choose! So where do you start? Here are a few tips to help you narrow down your search:

• Ask yourself what types of Kafka sessions you’re interested in. Kafka Connect? Kafka Streams? Real-world use cases? Thankfully, the agenda is set up to only have at most one type of each talk during each time slot. So if KStreams is your jam, you can potentially attend one every hour!

• Think about whether you’re interested in a particular industry or company. Even though Kafka Summit has a ton of great technical deep dives, the agenda showcases a number of cool sessions from companies and brands that you know and love––FREENOW, Mercedes-Benz, and Michelin to name a few.

• Remember the lightning talks! In years past, we’ve had a handful of lightning talks run during the same time as breakout sessions, meaning that it was tough to maximize your schedule. New this year, we’ve given lightning talks their own dedicated time slots.

And if all else fails, feel free to kick-start your personal Kafka Summit agenda with a few of the sessions that I’m looking forward to:

• Get a crash course in creating pipelines with Apache Kafka and Apache Flink in Apache Flink on Kafka: Reliable Data Pipelines Everyone Can Code with Ela Demir

• End-to-end tracing is all the rage this season, so be sure to check out Roman Kolesnev's session A Practical Guide to End-to-End Tracing in Event-Driven Architectures

• See a cool real-world use case with You've Got Mail! by Michael van der Haven

• Hear about the work that went into bringing exactly-once semantics to source connectors with Chris Egerton’s session Exactly-Once, Again: Adding EOS Support for Kafka Connect Source Connectors

That’s really just the tip of the iceberg. Check out the full agenda of 60+ breakout sessions, lightning talks, and panels to see what else is going on.

But wait, there’s more!

If you’ve been to Kafka Summit before, you know that it’s not just about attending sessions, learning from incredibly talented folks, and getting conference swag from sponsors on the expo floor. Conferences are a great place to connect with people; whether it’s someone you haven’t seen in ages, a committer whose brain you want to pick about a KIP or someone you’ve never met before, Kafka Summit is a great place to meet and catch up. (And while you’re doing so, be sure to keep the Pac-Man rule in mind!)

So, if a packed agenda of top-notch talks and seeing your peers in person isn't enough to convince you to attend Kafka Summit London 2023, know that we added so much more to the schedule this year to really round out everyone’s Kafka Summit experience:

• Fun Run Everyone loves a fun run! On Tuesday morning right before the conference begins, join us at 6:30 a.m. in the Aloft Hotel lobby for the unofficial Kafka Summit 5K fun run. All are welcome and no sign-up is required.

• Community Meetup Hub We’ve decided to bring our community meetup hub to Kafka Summit. Join members of the community in the expo hall where they’ll be presenting casual talks on cool subjects, like Python libraries for stream processing, using Flink with Kafka, architectures for real-time analytics, and more. Our community team is working to assemble the very best sessions, so keep checking the agenda for additions.

• Kafka Fundamentals Course If you’re new to Kafka entirely or you’re looking to formalize your skills, we’ve got you covered! Both mornings, we’re hosting a Kafka fundamentals course so you can hit the ground running at the conference. And we’re also hosting on-site training and certification courses to take your knowledge to the next level. Check out the registration page for more details.

• Kafka Summit Party It wouldn’t be Kafka Summit without a party to conclude day one of the conference. After the final breakout session on Tuesday, please join us on the expo hall floor for cocktails, food, and music by Sam Aaron! Sam’s futuristic cyberpunk music sets are improvised through the creation and manipulation of live code in real time using Sonic Pi, free software he created to make live coding music accessible to everyone. ​You won't want to miss it!

• Birds-of-a-Feather Luncheons Over lunch on day two of the conference, I encourage you to connect with other attendees at either of the two Birds-of-a-Feather luncheons we’re hosting for Women in Technology and Financial Services.

• #KafkaSummit As usual, we love a good live-tweet sesh. If you’re attending in person (and even if you’re not), be sure to follow all of the hype on Twitter and share your own updates with #KafkaSummit. And while you’re at it, why don’t you share a #StreamingSelfie or two? 

Are you excited? I’m excited…

I hope that was enough to get you looking forward to Kafka Summit London 2023. This is my first year serving as the Chair of the Program Committee, so I’m genuinely excited to attend this year’s conference and see all of our hard work come to fruition.

The only thing left for you to do is register for Kafka Summit London! Be sure to use code PRMBLG for a 25% discount on the list price. For those of you who’d like to attend virtually, we’ll be live streaming the keynote as well as one full track of breakout sessions and lightning talks; to gain access to the live stream, simply register for the free Streaming Pass. And don’t worry, as with past Kafka Summits, each session will be recorded and available for free to everyone after the event.

So what are you waiting for? Register for Kafka Summit London now!