Open Source Europe Tour - Berlin, Germany

Registration & Networking: 5:30 pm – 6:15 pm
(Drinks & food provided)
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 (and actually)
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.

Eric Morfa Morales
Lead Solution Architect Data & AI, STACKIT / Schwarz Digits
We’re excited to welcome Eric from STACKIT, where he is helping build a sovereign European cloud and AI ecosystem.
With a background spanning data engineering, machine learning, and platform architecture, Eric brings hands-on experience building scalable AI systems and modern data platforms in production environments.

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.