Confluent, Kafka, and Developer Advocacy with Lucia Cerchie

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 Top-Tier, Full-Stack Software Consultants This show is brought to you by Ship Shape. Ship Shape’s software consultants solve complex software and app development problems with top-tier coding expertise, superior service, and speed. In a sea of choices, our senior-level development crew rises above the rest by delivering the best solutions for fintech, cybersecurity, and other fast-growing industries. Check us out at shipshape.io.