DeveloperWeek 2023

Danica Fine, Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent

Houseplants can be hard – in many cases, over- and under-watering can have the same symptoms. Take away the guesswork involved in caring for your houseplants while also gaining valuable experience in building a practical, event-driven pipeline in your own home! This talk explores the process of building a houseplant monitoring and alerting system using a Raspberry Pi and Apache Kafka.

Moisture and temperature readings are captured from sensors in the soil and streamed into Kafka. From here, we’ll use stream processing to transform the data, creating a summary view of the current state and driving real-time push alerts to your phone through Telegram. In this session, I’ll talk about how I ingest the data, followed by the tools – including ksqlDB and Kafka Connect – that help transform the raw data into useful information, and finally I’ll show how to use Kafka Producers and Consumers to make the entire application more interactive.

By the end of the talk, you’ll have everything you need to start building practical streaming pipelines in your own home. Roll up your sleeves – let’s get our hands dirty!