Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Join us for “A Kristmas Kafka,” an informal technical roundtable with Apache Kafka committers, contributors, and community leaders. We’re gathering the people who build and shape Kafka to explore where the project has been, where it is today, and where it’s heading next. No marketing, no product pitches—just a dense, technical conversation about architecture, innovation, and the future of streaming systems.

Never contributed to open source and feeling intimidated? Same. Before joining Datadog, Alessandro had zero open source experience. Now he's a regular contributor to Apache Iceberg. Here's exactly how he got started. Step 1: Join the Slack community and answer user questions. Step 2: Look for "good first issue" tags in the repo. Step 3: Remember that opening bug reports and doing code reviews count as contributions too.

We dive into the game-changing Aiven AI Editor, a powerful tool that lets you interact with your data using natural language. No more syntax headaches. Instantly generate a visual map of your database to understand your tables and their relationships at a glance. Watch how easy it is to ask questions like "How many sales did we have in 2025?" and get perfectly formatted SQL queries in seconds.

In this episode, Daniel Roe, Lead Maintainer of the Nuxt framework, discusses his journey from studying law and theology to leading a major open-source framework. He explains Nuxt's unique governance and how Nuxt manages contributions through volunteer-driven work, LLM-powered issue triage, and creating welcoming spaces for newcomers to open source. This week, our chat touches on a variety of topics including.

Zander Matheson, Staff Product Manager at Confluent, chats with Hugh at Confluent Current about Kafka war stories.

In this talk, Fintan Halpenny discusses the current state of open source forges, why GitHub is becoming more hostile, what other forges are out there, and why you should consider Radicle to be the next home for your open source project. About Fintan Fintan Halpenny (@fintohaps) has been a part of the Radicle project for 6 years, seeing the different twists and turns of this ever-evolving idea and protocol. When he’s not programming, he’s playing around with music, or looking at the world upside-down on his hands.

Welcome to “Elephant in the Room – Presented by Aiven.” In this live series, we dig into the real-world challenges developers face when building modern applications on PostgreSQL, the elephant everyone depends on but few fully leverage. Episode 2: Join Jay Miller, Staff Product Advocate at Aiven, and special guest Alexis Roberson – senior developer educator, and feature flag enthusiast – as they explore how developers can use feature flags to ship faster, reduce risk, and create better user experiences with PostgreSQL-backed applications.

Kyle McCullough, Co-Founder & CTO at OpsHelm, former Head of Infrastructure Engineering at ProdPerfect and Lead Engineer at Vivid Seats, joins host Hugh Evans to explore what it takes to build real-time, multi-cloud streaming infrastructure at scale. As Co-Founder and CTO of OpsHelm, Kyle shares how his team processes hundreds of terabytes of cloud events daily, maintaining sub-second visibility while reducing streaming costs by 78% after migrating from MSK and NATS to Aiven Diskless Kafka.

Join host Hugh Evans for a high-energy hour of rapid-fire conversations with experts shaping the future of streaming data. Broadcasting directly from Current 2025 in New Orleans, this episode packs six lightning interviews into one hour, mixing deep technical insights with a few fun surprises along the way. Guests include Olena Kutsenko (Confluent), Ben Gamble (Ververica), Alex Merced (Dremio), Sion Smith (OSO), Zander Matheson (ex-ByteWax, Confluent), Hojjat Jafarpour (DeltaStream), and Tom Scott (Streambased).

Michael Drogalis, founder of ShadowTraffic and former Confluent stream-processing lead, joins Hugh Evans to tackle one of the hardest problems in Kafka: generating realistic synthetic test data. From his work on Kafka Streams, ksqlDB, and the Onyx platform, Michael shares practical insights for engineering teams struggling with testing and demo data at scale.