Nov. 2019
A look at how Apache Kafka has evolved from a simple messaging system into the backbone of modern data architectures. The session explores Kafka’s role as a central nervous system for streaming data, showing how event-driven patterns, stream processing, and connectors enable organizations to unify operational and analytical workloads in real time.
I contribute to LangChain4j, an idiomatic open source Java library for building LLM-powered applications on the JVM. Recent work includes adding native vector search embedding stores so developers can build RAG, recommendation engines, and AI memory systems.
I’ve been speaking at conferences since 2008 and doing it full time as part of my work with DevRel since 2018. My talks go deep on the systems I build with: distributed systems and event streaming, AI engineering and vector search, and the data infrastructure that has to hold up when the demo ends and production begins. Some of the events I’ve spoken at include AWS re:Invent, Microsoft Ignite, Google Cloud Next, KubeCon, Oracle OpenWorld, QCon, Strange Loop, Kafka Summit, Pulsar Summit, JavaOne, DevNexus, JFokus, JNation, and All Things Open.
You can find my upcoming and past talks on my speaking calendar. Recordings also live on my YouTube channel, and the code I write for talks, demos, and workshops is on my GitHub.
If you’d like to hire me as a consultant for your projects, speak at your event, or lead a hands-on workshop for your team, contact me at riferrei@riferrei.com. I can understand the scope of your request and provide a free estimate.
I work at the intersection of AI, data infrastructure, and distributed systems. In practice, that means hands-on AI engineering: building vector search, semantic caching, agent memory, and RAG into the data layer, and figuring out how to ship AI agents securely. I also contribute to the LangChain4j open-source project.
The AI-native work isn’t a pivot, though. It draws on the same systems-design foundation I’ve built for 20+ years: designing data systems for scale, processing fast data, watching where systems break; now applied to vectors and agents. I have worked on RDBMS and Big Data at Oracle; event streaming with Apache Kafka and Apache Flink at Confluent; observability at Elastic; AI and developer tooling at AWS; and NoSQL and vector stores at Redis.
This foundation is exactly what separates AI demos that work on stage from AI systems that survive production.
