Confluent, Kafka, and Developer Advocacy with Lucia Cerchie

Whiskey Web and Whatnot: Web Development, Neat

When you think about the career journey of a software developer, teaching elementary school is not typically the first thing that comes to mind. But for Lucia Cerchie, Developer Advocate at Confluent, her elementary school teaching experience gave her a huge advantage in her work.

In this episode, Lucia discusses her work with Kafka, a distributed event streaming platform, and how she creates content to introduce developers to Kafka more easily, especially for beginners. She explains Kafka’s scalability and how it can handle large amounts of data in real-time, making it a great choice for processing high volumes of data. But Kafka isn’t the answer for everyone. Lucia emphasizes the importance of understanding the "why" behind using it and knowing when to leverage it based on the problem at hand.

Lucia talks to Robbie and Chuck about her journey from being an elementary school teacher to her career in developer advocacy, her work at Confluent with Kafka, and how she creates content to make complex technologies more accessible.

Key Takeaways

• [00:27] - Introduction to Lucia Cerchie.
• [01:46] - A whiskey review: Barrel Bourbon Batch 032.
• [06:45] - Hot takes from Twitter.
• [14:21] - Lucia’s path to becoming a developer advocate.
• [19:58] - Lucia explains Kafka.
• [26:35] - Lucia explains Confluent and its business model.
• [39:15] - Programming languages Lucia has used in her tutorials.
• [44:17] - Chuck, Robbie, and Lucia talk about exercise.
• [47:45] - Lucia talks about her hobbies.

Quotes

[16:01] - “The motivation actually comes from back when I was teaching. Which is, I want to help other people learn and make teaching accessible.” ~ Lucia Cerchie

[25:03] - “Kafka's use cases are not just event-driven web apps. It’s things like main frame conversions, data pipelines.” ~ Lucia Cerchie

[40:08] - “I think I would recommend Python to absolute beginners to coding just because of the human readability of the language.” ~ Lucia Cerchie

Links

• Lucia Cerchie Twitter
• Lucia Cerchie LinkedIn
• Confluent
• Confluent Developer
• What is Apache Kafka®? (A Confluent Lightboard by Tim Berglund) + ksqlDB
• Apache Kafka Documentation
• Cerchie/learn-about-CLIs
• Cerchie/magic-byte-illustration
• Cerchie/git-cherry-pick-tutorial
• AIS demo
• Barrell Bourbon Batch 032
• Band-Aid
• Twitter
• NPM
• Tailwind CSS
• Vanilla CSS
• Typescript
• Ember JS
• ThePrimeagen
• IBM
• GraphQL
• New York Times
• Wordle
• Facebook
• National Geographic
• Socket
• Vim
• Kinesis Ergo
• Dvorak Keyboard
• Windows
• Mac
• Linux
• Acquia
• Rust
• Elixir
• ChatGPT
• Daisy Jones & the Six
• Fleetwood Mac
• Stack Overflow
• Neovim
• CoffeeScript
• WebAssembly
• GitHub

Connect with our hosts

• Robbie Wagner
• Chuck Carpenter
• Ship Shape

Subscribe and stay in touch

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Podcasts
• Whiskey Web and Whatnot

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