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

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Spotify

Google Podcasts

Whiskey Web and Whatnot


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