Like a fortunate child on Christmas Day, I’ve got a brand new toy! A brand new—to me—open-source technology to unwrap, learn, and perhaps even aspire to master elements of within.

I joined Decodable two weeks ago, and since Decodable is built on top of Apache Flink it seems like a great time to learn it. After six years learning Apache Kafka and hearing about this “Flink” thing but—for better or worse—never investigating it, I now have the perfect opportunity to do so.

An image of a squirrel at a laptop looking at a map, preparing to navigate the wonderful world of Apache Flink

Just like the aforementioned kid with a new toy, what else would I do except run around (figuratively) with wild excitement, clicking on all the Apache Flink links and demos and tutorials and presentations and videos that I could find! And then I realised I should take somewhat of a more measured approach to my learning, and started to map out the different areas.

A mindmap of the areas of Apache Flink about which I want to learn

Breaking this out into sub-topics gives me nice little nuggets to start exploring (and blogging about, of course!). These include:

Some of these are going to be fairly self-contained (what is Flink) whilst others (learning Flink) are going to be a multi-year journey :)