Kafka, Flink, and Beyond

Satish Duggana is a tech lead for Data and Streaming Infrastructure at Uber. He is Apache Kafka Committer, Apache Storm Committer/PMC and contributed to a few other open source projects.

Danica began her career as a software engineer in data visualization and warehousing with a business intelligence team where she served as a point-person for standards and best practices in data visualization across her company. In 2018, Danica moved to San Francisco and pivoted to backend engineering with a derivatives data team which was responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure that processes millions of financial market data per second in near real-time. Her first project on this team involved Kafka Streams – she never looked back. Danica now works as a Developer Advocate with Confluent where she helps others get the most out of their event-driven pipelines.

Outside of work, Danica is passionate about sustainability, increasing diversity in the technical community, and keeping her many houseplants alive. She can be found on Twitter, tweeting about tech, plants, and baking @TheDanicaFine.

Ismael Juma is an engineering leader at Confluent focusing on Apache Kafka and Confluent Cloud. Ismael worked on initiatives such as Infinite Storage in Confluent Cloud and replacing ZooKeeper with a Kafka Raft (KRaft) metadata quorum. Ismael is also an Apache Kafka Committer and Project Management Committee (PMC) member.

Anna McDonald is The Technical Voice of the Customer at Confluent. Prior to joining Confluent, she was a principal software developer at SAS Institute. She specializes in integration architecture and event streaming. Her most recent work includes creation of the derivative events design pattern. A speaker at Kafka Summit and Jfokus, Anna loves all things technical as well as math puns.

Tobias Nothaft is leading the Streaming Platform team at BMW Group providing Apache Kafka and its ecosystem for the company. He has worked as an integration consultant at IBM and joined the BMW Group in 2017 taking over responsibility for various integration technologies. With his successful introduction of Apache Kafka he shifted his focus completely towards data streaming, today empowering hundreds of application teams.

Hitesh is the Managing Director of Chase Data, AI/ML Platform Architecture and Engineering. In this role, he is responsible for the end-to-end architecture and technology strategy for Chase Data and AI/ML platforms.

His team is also responsible for the engineering of the core data platforms such as batch and stream ingestion, transformation, and processing, leveraging these core capabilities as anchors of several data products and pipelines.

Before re-joining Chase, Hitesh led several large-scale data, cloud, and AI technology transformations at financial services and healthcare companies such as American Express, and IQVIA.

Hitesh grew up in India and developed a passion for computing in his early childhood after getting his hands on a "Zx Spectrum." He pursued his passion at his Alma mater, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur.

Martijn Visser is Senior Product Manager at Confluent and PMC member and Committer for the Apache Flink project. He works with the open source community on user facing features such as the Table/SQL and DataStream API, connectors, and formats. Prior to joining Confluent, he worked as Product Manager at Immerok, which was acquired by Confluent.

He has also worked as Product Manager at Ververica, where he was responsible for product development on Apache Flink and Ververica Platform, and as Product Lead at ING, where he was responsible for ING's Streaming Data and Engagement Platform.