The videos from TEDx Winchester 2023 are now live on YouTube – including a recording of my talk. This feels like a good point to look at back at what the experience was like.
My TEDx talk
July 24th, 2023Walking to work
July 21st, 2023My commute changed a few weeks ago – from a short drive, to a cross-country walk. I had to return my company car as we don’t do them any more, and I chose not to replace it. So now I’m starting and ending my day with a walk.
What can you do with IBM Event Automation?
July 9th, 2023This is IBM Event Automation : a new product we released last month to help our clients create event driven solutions.
I’ve written a 200-word summary of what IBM Event Automation is, but in this post I wanted to dive a little bit deeper and show what it can do.
Machine Learning for Kids with EduBlocks
July 8th, 2023Students can now create Machine Learning for Kids projects using EduBlocks – letting them create machine learning Python projects in the browser by dragging and dropping blocks on a canvas.
This is all thanks to a fantastic new contribution from Joshua Lowe.
Here’s a quick run-through to show what this makes possible.
What is IBM Event Automation?
July 4th, 2023A summary of IBM Event Automation in under 200 words.
Last week was the first release of IBM Event Automation. I’ve been asked what it’s all about, so I thought it’d be helpful to have a brief summary to point people at.
IBM Event Automation is a collection of three components, designed to help companies be productive in creating event-driven solutions.
An introduction to Kafka Connect and Kafka Streams using Xbox
June 18th, 2023This is a talk I gave at Kafka Summit last month. It was an introduction to the Java APIs for Kafka Connect and Kafka Streams, using data from Xbox to bring the examples to life.
Confluent require personal details to watch recordings from Kafka Summit – sorry
What children can learn about artificial intelligence
May 21st, 2023One of the conference presentations I gave last year was a talk at Heapcon, sharing some stories of AI/ML lessons I’ve run in schools. The focus of the talk was how I’ve seen children understand and react to machine learning technologies.
I’ve since expanded the ideas in this talk into a mini-book at MachineLearningForKids.co.uk/stories but here is a recording of where some of these stories started.
Using Xbox to get started with Kafka Connect & Kafka Streams
May 17th, 2023It’s easy for developers who aren’t immersed in all-things-Kafka to assume that “Apache Kafka” just means an event backbone: something that hosts topics (and perhaps the client libraries to produce and consume messages using those topics). But Kafka is more than that. It is an ecosystem of tools that enables a complete event-streaming application.
That was the premise of this talk, recorded at Devoxx UK, which I gave to a room of Java developers. I introduced them to two other bits of Kafka: Kafka Connect (for getting data in and out of Kafka topics from external systems) and Kafka Streams (for developing stream processing applications).
Because they were Java developers, I thought the best way to give them a flavour of these tools was to show them the APIs, and walk through an example solution made using the APIs.
The example solution used Kafka tools to process data from Xbox – mostly because I’m a gamer and it made for a fun, if silly, demo.