On July 31st, we welcomed the Melbourne data streaming community to our Factor House HQ in Northcote for an evening of real-time insights, local dev tools, and excellent company, cohosted with our friends at Confluent.
The event, From Real-Time Data to Insights & Local Development with Kafka and Flink, was packed with engineers, data practitioners, and curious minds looking to deepen their knowledge of stream processing and hands-on development workflows.
Pizza, drinks, and chatter kicked things off, and the vibes didn't disappoint. The crowd was buzzing with conversation, from real-time architectures to favorite CLI tools.
Talks That Delivered
Olena Kutsenko, Staff Developer Advocate at Confluent
Olena Kutsenko, Staff Developer Advocate at Confluent, took the stage first with The Art of Structuring Real-time Data Streams into Actionable Insights. Her talk offered a compelling walkthrough of the Kafka–Flink–Iceberg stack, showing how to tame messy real-time data and prepare it for analytics and AI. Attendees praised her clarity and technical depth:
“Olena managed to communicate her ideas in a way that was comprehensible to non-technical people, whilst still articulating the value for more experienced attendees.”
Jaehyeon Kim, Developer Experience Engineer at Factor House
Read Jae's blog post about Factor House Local & Labs
Next up, Jaehyeon Kim, Developer Experience Engineer at Factor House, gave a tour of Hands-On Local Development: Kafka, Flink, Docker, and more. Jae introduced Factor House Labs — a collection of open-source Docker environments designed to get engineers experimenting with modern data platforms fast.
“Jae’s passion for the product was infectious. His demo showed just how easy it is to spin up a full end-to-end data pipeline locally.”
Community, Connection, and What’s Next
Beyond the talks, a big highlight was the crowd itself. We saw first-timers, veterans, and everyone in between sharing ideas and chatting about use cases.
This meetup also marked the launch of the Factor House Community on Slack, a space to keep the conversation going, swap tips, and collaborate on all things real-time.
Next Stop: Sydney!
Couldn’t make it to Melbourne? This meetup will happen again in Sydney on September 16. Sydney Apache Kafka x Flink Meetup
Stay Connected
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