Hey, Cassandra Community People! It’s Time to Get Off Your Screens and Meet Up!

We recently sat down with Patrick McFadin, our Developer Relations leader and Apache Cassandra® contributor/evangelist, to discuss the upcoming Cassandra Day + Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in-person events in Silicon Valley (Santa Clara), Seattle (Bellevue), and Houston on November 10th. Here are the highlights and why you should attend:

Lorena: Should people put on real pants and go to a Cassandra Day?

Patrick: Here’s my call to action: Cassandra community people, it’s time to get off your screens and talk to each other in person—not on Slack or Discord or Zoom! The energy and the inspiration you get from being with a group of like-minded people, people who are going somewhere, feeds your energy. You’ll walk out of that meetup feeling 100% different! You’ll feel inspired!

Lorena: DataStax is hosting these events. What’s in it for DataStax?

Patrick: It’s part of our commitment to the Cassandra project. There are a lot of people and organizations who contribute their time and effort to building an amazing database. We not only work on Apache Cassandra—we are part of the community—and we want to put our energy into helping the community do things. Just like we have people committed to creating code and documentation, we have people committed to creating events around Cassandra and just generally helping people get together.

Lorena: Why in-person events, instead of a virtual event for the entire Cassandra community?

Patrick: These meetups are all about the in-person moment. I just came back from ApacheCon North America, and it’s like we’ve forgotten what it means to be in the same room together. You get to talk to people about what you’re doing in Cassandra, ask questions, make new friends, and get new contacts. We’re going to restart the way we felt back in 2019. If we’re successful, we’ll keep doing this in other cities. So, Cassandra people, come join us. We need your support!

Lorena: Thanks to you, Patrick, we have Intel as a co-sponsor for these three events. What is Intel’s connection to Cassandra?

Patrick: Here’s the thing about Intel. They’ve been doing a lot of stuff for open source and the Cassandra project. No one knows that. It’s time for them to get active and be seen as a part of the community and get some credit. Plus, Intel is an important player in the world of building computer applications. They provide a lot of the gizmos that make things work right in our world.

Lorena: Who should attend these meetups? Are they aimed at Cassandra pros only?

Patrick: We’ve got something for people at all levels. If you’re new to Cassandra or want to know more about building apps with NoSQL and Cassandra, come early for lunch and the hands-on workshop. You’ll get a voucher for Cassandra certification testing that’s worth $300.

The meetup after the workshop goes more in-depth for people who want to know more about what’s happening in the Cassandra project and the community. The speakers we’re lining up for the meetups will take a deeper dive and share great use cases for Cassandra. I personally can’t wait to hear from John Haddad of Netflix (Santa Clara meetup). Netflix goes back to the very beginnings of Cassandra, and they’re not slowing down. It’s always great to get an update about what’s exciting to them, and how they’re running Cassandra in production.

Attend the workshop, the meetup, or both. Either way, you’re getting two movie tickets and a popcorn voucher!

Lorena: We have speakers from Quine on the agenda for Seattle (Bellevue) and Houston. Who or what is Quine?

Patrick: Quine is an example of the Cassandra ecosystem that’s developing and that we want to start elevating, so I’m really excited about their participation. Quine is an open source project. They’ve built a real-time streaming graph app that uses Cassandra… but Cassandra is completely invisible. It’s like Cassandra is their secret sauce. Another ecosystem example is Temporal, an open source, workflow-based app development platform. Again, it uses Cassandra to do what it needs to do, but behind the scenes. Now there are developers out there building apps that don’t even know they’re using Cassandra.

Lorena: Can we give a shout-out to the DataStax speakers and the breaking news they’ll be talking about at all three meetups? ACID transactions coming to Cassandra?

Patrick: Ever since we unveiled this at ApacheCon, we’ve been getting a lot of OMG responses. The short story is: ACID transactions in Apache Cassandra opens the way for a whole new set of use cases in finance, banking, and other industries that need a high-trust system—without a lot of developer workarounds. Read our article on The New Stack and bring your questions to the meetup!

Lorena: Thank you, Patrick. My last question is one I’ve been getting a lot. Why Houston, and why a free movie?

Patrick: Me too! I say, why not Houston? There are pockets of innovation everywhere, not just in Silicon Valley and Seattle. We want to show up for places like Houston that are underrepresented in the community and bring those folks together. We know the Cassandra base is there because we have a lot of clients in Houston. So, Houston, don’t let us down! Sign up and meet up! As for the movie, we can thank our co-sponsor Intel for hooking us up with these pre-premiere private screenings of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. It’s our way of thanking the Cassandra community for being so awesome and for coming out and spending the afternoon with us.

Space is limited, so don’t wait. Go here for more information and to register for a Cassandra Day in your city!