Kafka Materials

I had signed up as a Mentor for a pilot program based on Experiential Learning to mentor a group of 5 people on technology that they have never used —Apache Kafka 🙌

The key was to give a scenario — which is not too hard to setup — and guide them to use Kafka to solve a basic problem statement.

More and more recipes would be added at each level which would force them to think about guarantees, data retention, scaling, etc.

Of course, this means that I should be 5 steps ahead preparing the recipes and also make sure that they have a reference to depend on, whenever they are stuck; and weekly check-in meetings to give a summary/demo on the concepts learned with each recipe.

I thought it was going to be a one-time preparation where I spend an entire weekend coming up with the course skeleton and share it part by part each week. But I was COMPLETELY WRONG 😆 As the course progressed, I had to regroup recipes, add few, cut down a few, to keep it truly “Level 0” and bring more focus to Kafka than digressing to some other problem. Well, mentoring is not an easy effort 🤷‍♀️

The eager questions from Mentees and weekend discussions made the whole experience a lot more fun and definitely worth all the effort!

Here is the course material. I hope it helps someone understand how much there is to think about when you start using Kafka.

Disclaimer : It is just Level 0 😊