Bonn Agile Meetup - December 2015: Apache Kafka and Go Programming Language

Let's begin with old news: In November we talked about the future of the Bonn Agile meetup. As most of the organizers stem from a background in software development, we are planning to shift the focus more into the technological domain. For those primarily interested in methodology like Scrum, there is an interesting new meetup in Bonn, Scrumtisch Bonn.

We also decided to try a different format for our next meetup: Instead of having a single, longer talk which demands a significant amount of preparation, we wanted to try two shorter talks, which require less preparation and leave more space for a dialogue between the participants.

So the December meetup featured two tech topics, Apache Kafka presented by Andreas Kluth, and the Go Programming Language by Sebastian Mancke. The meetup was once again hosted by the generous folks at Tarent Solutions.

Andreas talked about using Kafka as a means to allow communication between services in a "shared-nothing" microservice architecture. As Kafka is a really light-weight pub-sub-messaging system, it is optimized for performance and throughput. The buzzword "Big Data" is really overused these days, but that's where Kafka has it's strengths, especially as it allows clustering of instances, which makes it perfectly scalable. Feel free to check out Andreas' slides.

In an interesting live coding demo, Andreas also built a scenario with Kafka, Zookeeper for clustering, and a producer and consumer of messages. This was a great opportunity for the audience to chime in and share their ideas and perspective, and evolved into an interesting dialogue.

After a short break, Sebastian took over and talked about the Go programming language. It is gaining a significant momentum, Google is pushing Go usage in Android apps, which used to be an almost exclusive Java domain. Although Sebastian has not used Go in a major project, he is optimistic that there will be more demand in Go in the near future.

As you can see in Sebastian's notes, the syntax of Go is both simple and expressive. It also introduces some interesting concepts like channels, which makes it easier to deal with concurrency. Sebastian described Go as easy to learn, he was able to become fluent in a few weeks and told us he gets things done faster in Go than in Java, although he is an advanced Java programmer.

Sebastian also did some live coding, which again proved as a great means to get the dialogue going and ask more in-depth questions.

After a well-deserved round of applause for the speakers, we had a few beers and ended the evening with some more tech banter. As always, it was great to meet up, have fun and learn something new.

The next meetup will be in February 2016, please follow us on Twitter where we will announce the exact date. Have a great Christmas break and a happy New Year!