Archive for May, 2026

Presenting at Current / Kafka Summit

Thursday, May 21st, 2026

A few of us at Current this week were talking about how Current (formerly “Kafka Summit”) has changed over the years, and it got me remembering the bits I’ve contributed.

I dug through some old posts to find seven Current / Kafka Summit talks I’ve done… it makes for an eclectic set when I see it in one list!

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Embedding Tiny Language Models in Flink SQL

Wednesday, May 20th, 2026

I gave a talk at Current yesterday about how to embed a tiny language model inside your Flink SQL pipeline.

I used a fun mix of demos to show what I think are the main approaches available for using generative AI with Kafka events from a Flink SQL job. Some demos were definitely more sensible than others!

These are the slides I used, and what I’d planned to say.

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In this session, I’ll be talking about your options for running language models for Flink SQL jobs.

I’ll cover:

  • your options for where you run them, in relation to Flink
  • what sorts of choices you have for the models you run
  • how to use them – the sorts of prompts and settings we’d want for Flink
  • how to keep an eye on it that it’s working well
  • and finally, some thoughts on when it’s a good idea to do any of this

(more…)

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Instrumenting a Kafka Connect connector with metrics

Saturday, May 2nd, 2026

Metrics can help provide operational insight over Kafka Connect connectors, informing users of how to better configure them. With simple updates, a Kafka Connect connector can be instrumented to make this possible by emitting useful metrics.

A couple years ago, I created a simple skeleton Connect connector project to help developers at a hackathon create their first Kafka connector.

I’ve updated the source connector from that sample to emit metrics. In this post, I’ll walk through what I did, as an example for how to add metrics to your own Kafka connector.

(more…)

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