Two weeks left to win $5k: Challenging the Kafka community to build big with small Kafka

Only one week has passed since our last blog covering some of the fantastic entries so far, and we already have a fresh batch to share. The community has risen to the challenge to build something cool and share it for the chance to win $5k and we’re really excited to show you what they’ve built.

If you’d like to try your hand at building something cool with Free Tier but don’t know where to start, why not check out some of the submissions so far below for inspiration. You still have until January 31st to participate.

Get Inspired

We’ve had some fantastic entries this week, here are just a few of my favourites to get you started

Real-time multiplayer, score boards, and analytics

I’m totally blown away by this fully featured, chicken-themed, Space Invaders clone which Yusuf Ganiyu made over the course of a weekend. I made my own space invaders game last year over the course of a few weeks which pales in comparison to this project. Read all about it here on Yusuf’s blog.

Protecting Undersea Cables from Rogue Anchors with Kafka and Flink

Not content with merely building a cool demo, Jaime López is helping to protect the infrastructure that keeps Northern Europe online. His alerting system, powered by Kafka and Flink, uses shipping data to warn of vessels that may damage undersea cables with dragging anchors in real-time. This is an extremely impressive project, especially as a hobby project, it’s very cool to see how individuals can use publicly available data like this to tackle real world problems.

Real-time Urban Planning with Kafka and Raspberry Pi Pico

This project ticks all the boxes for me: Raspberry Pi, Kafka, 3D printing, and a live hands-on demo rolled into one. Having recently used a Pico in my own project I know how tricky it can be to get them working reliably with Kafka so I was super impressed with Damien’s project which uses a Pico W to read RFID tags and send the data directly to Kafka. If you’re interested in finding out more about his project check out the excellent part one of his writeup here.

DevSecOps Security Analytics

Last but not least we have another great entry from Arun Chettiar, this time demoing how Kafka can power real-time DevSecOps analysis. Check out how he built a handy dashboard to do exactly that here.

Submit Your Own Project

Feeling inspired? Show us what you can build and submit your project by January 31st.

Good luck and happy building!