Open Source Europe Tour - Berlin, Germany

​Registration & Networking: 5:30 pm – 6:15 pm
(Drinks & food provided)

The event will also include a networking break between the talks.

​This event is kindly hosted at the offices of our partner, Netlight Consulting.

​Will Martin

​AI Evangelist at Dremio & Author of the upcoming AI for Dummies.

​AI is everywhere — but what does it actually mean in practice?

​Will will give a practical, hype-free walkthrough of modern AI and how it fits into today’s data stack and lakehouse architectures.

​🚀 Topics include:

• ​What Agentic AI is — and how it differs from LLMs

• ​How LLMs work under the hood

• ​Fine-tuning vs RAG vs prompt engineering

• ​Connecting AI to your data, APIs, and lakehouse with MCP

• ​Real-world benefits, risks, and implementation considerations

​A clear introduction to how AI really works — and how to use it effectively.

​Olena Kutsenko

​Staff Developer Advocate, Confluent

​Olena will explore what it really takes to move data from Kafka into Apache Iceberg tables reliably and at scale.

​🔍 Topics include:

• ​Schema evolution & data normalization

• ​Exactly-once guarantees & late-arriving events

• ​Partitioning & table maintenance

• ​Trade-offs between Kafka Connect, Flink pipelines, and custom ingestion approaches

​Using Confluent Tableflow as a practical example, this session focuses on building robust streaming-to-lakehouse architectures — regardless of tooling.

​Bjarne Schröder

​Software Engineer, STACKIT

​We're excited to welcome Bjarne from STACKIT, where he works on Data & AI product offerings.

​Having transitioned from Data Engineering to Software Engineering, Bjarne brings experience from both perspectives of the data ecosystem—first as a user of cloud-native data services and now as someone who helps build and deliver them.

​Passionate about connecting with people and exploring technology, Bjarne enjoys diving into all kinds of nerdy topics in his free time and cycling around his hometown of Cologne, Germany.

​Andrew Madson

​Head of Developer Relations, Fivetran

​Andrew has spent more than a decade leading analytics and ML teams across organizations including J.P. Morgan Chase, MassMutual, and Arizona State University before moving into DevRel and developer community leadership.

​He is:

• ​Founding Head of DevRel at Fivetran

• ​Co-author of Apache Polaris: The Definitive Guide

• ​Speaker, educator, and creator with a 250K+ global audience

• ​A leading voice in Apache Iceberg, lakehouses, and AI-ready data platforms

​Expect practical insights on modern data infrastructure, developer ecosystems, and building AI-ready architectures.

​Alex Merced

​Head of DevRel at Dremio & O’Reilly Author

​Alex will walk through key ideas from his latest work on Agentic Analytics and building data platforms that actually work for AI.

​🔍 What to expect:

• ​Why data silos break AI agents

• ​The role of the lakehouse, federation & semantic layers

• ​Apache Iceberg, open catalogs & modern architectures

• ​Why AI agents need context — not just data

• ​A roadmap toward autonomous, AI-driven analytics

​A sharp, architecture-focused session connecting modern data platforms with the future of AI.