The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Event-Driven Applications: Where Low Latency Meets High Impact with Apurva Mehta of Responsive

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

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Welcome to the Data Stack Show Prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show. You'll get to meet our guest and hear about the topics we're going to cover. If they're interesting to you, you can catch the full-length show when it drops on Wednesday. We are here with Aferba from Responsive, and we are so excited to chat about many topics today. Event-based applications and all the infrastructure, both underneath and on top of them to run them. So Aparva, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. Yeah, great. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

Give us just your brief background. You spent a lot of time in the world of streaming. You're a multi-time entrepreneur, but give us the story. How did you get into the world of streaming? Yeah, thanks. No, yeah, I have. I first got exposed. I mean, I was at LinkedIn, you know, like I've been at LinkedIn content and now I doing Responsive, but I got exposed to streaming at LinkedIn. You know, I wrote a SAMHSA job back in the day and, you know, through LinkedIn, got to know the founders of Confluent, moved on to Confluent, worked in Kafka and Kafka, KSQL, Kafka streams for years basically. And, you know, Responsive continues the line. We are building a

platform to manage these event-driven applications in the cloud and yeah so but it began at linkedin i would say in 2013 that's awesome well i have a couple of actually i have many questions that's i'd like to ask you hopefully we'll have the time like to go through all of that stuff but some of like the high-level topics that I'm really interested in, first of all, I'd love to hear from you. What is Kafka? And what are, as a technology, and as a protocol, or as a standard, probably, and what's happening with the products that are built around it. And the next thing that is very interesting is, and inspired from what you are doing today, about developer experience and things around Kafka Streams.

What it means to build, why we want to build things with Kafka Streams, and what can be done better for the engineers out there that they are using Kafka Streams and Kafka, obviously, to work with that. So that's a few of the things that I'd love to get deeper into. But how about you? What are some things that you're excited about discussing today? Yeah, all of that that sounds and you know those are all topics i'm very passionate about i think it's good to tell

the story that like what you said kafka as a tech standard as a technology the differentiation there i think i would also say it's talking a bit about like this world on top of kafka right like stream processing i think is a very overloaded world. Many use cases, many different ways to slice that space up, right? Many different technologies in that space. You know, I think talking about the space itself and how, you know, sharing my point of view on how to think about it

and then maybe getting into Kafka Streams and like how the technologies differ with a focus on Kafka streams, I think would be a very interesting, I think an educational conversation, you know, so I'm excited about doing that. Yeah. A hundred percent. And let's do it. What do you think, Eric? Yeah, let's dig in. This is going to be great.

All right. That's a wrap for the prequel. The full length episode will drop Wednesday morning. Subscribe now so you don't miss it.