Tim Berglund

Tim Berglund
   

VP Developer Relations at Confluent

Tim is a teacher, author, and technology leader with Confluent, where he serves as the Vice President of Developer Relations. He is a regular speaker at conferences and a presence on YouTube explaining complex technology topics in an accessible way. He tweets as @tlberglund, blogs every few years at http://timberglund.com. He has three grown children and two grandchildren, a fact about which he is rather excited.

Presentations

Building Agents with MCP and Data Streams

1:30 PM MDT

LLMs are incredibly powerful, but they have two problems: they only know what they read on the Internet, and they can’t actually do anything—they can only chat with you. If you want to build agentic applications that have access to the immediate, non-public context of your business, and you want your agents to be able take actions in the world, you’ll probably need some help from the Model Context Protocol, or MCP.

And that “business context” increasingly exists in the form of real-time streaming data, often in Kafka topics. Once you’re asking your microservices to interpret natural-language prompts, then deputizing them to take actions on your behalf—this is what an agent is!—you can’t afford for them to be acting on out-of-data context. They need to remain deeply connected to the events that matter to your business.

In this presentation, we’ll get a solid overview of MCP itself, then see you how you can use it to build practical multi-agent architectures powered by real-time, streaming data. We’ll see what’s possible when we stop thinking about AI as an external chatbot and start treating it as part of our streaming architecture. Agents are here, and they are powered by streams.

Decision Making in Software Teams

8:30 AM MDT

Alistair Cockburn has described software development as a game in which we choose among three moves: invent, decide, and communicate. Most of our time at No Fluff is spent learning how to be better at inventing. Beyond that, we understand the importance of good communication, and take steps to improve in that capacity. Rarely, however, do we acknowledge the role of decision making in the life of software teams, what can cause it to go wrong, and how to improve it.

In this talk, we will explore decision making pathologies and their remedies in individual, team, and organizational dimensions. We'll consider how our own cognitive limitations can lead us to to make bad decisions as individuals, and what we might do to compensate for those personal weaknesses. We'll learn how a team can fall into decisionmaking dysfunction, and what techniques a leader might employ to healthy functioning to an afflicted group. We'll also look at how organizational structure and culture can discourage quality decision making, and what leaders to swim against the tide.

Software teams spend a great deal of time making decisions that place enormous amounts of capital on the line. Team members and leaders owe it to themselves to learn how to make them well.

Mastering Tech Leadership in 60 Minutes

10:30 AM MDT

If only it were so easy! Leadership is a thing into which many find themselves thrown, and to which many others aspire—and it is a thing which every human system needs to thrive. Leading teams in technology organizations is not radically different from any other kind of organization, but does tend to present a common set of patterns and challenges. In this session, I’ll examine them, and provide a template for your own growth as a leader.

We’ll cover the following:
The relationship between leadership, management, and vision
Common decision-making pathologies and ways to avoid them
Strategies for communication with a diverse team
The basics of people management
How to conduct meetings
How to set and measure goals
How to tell whether this is a vocation to pursue

No, you will not master leadership in this short session, but we will cover some helpful material that will move you forward.

Books

Building and Testing with Gradle

Building and Testing with Gradle

by Tim Berglund and Matthew McCullough

Build and test software written in Java and many other languages with Gradle, the open source project automation tool that’s getting a lot of attention. This concise introduction provides numerous code examples to help you explore Gradle, both as a build tool and as a complete solution for automating the compilation, test, and release process of simple and enterprise-level applications.

Discover how Gradle improves on the best ideas of Ant, Maven, and other build tools, with standards for developers who want them and lots of flexibility for those who prefer less structure.

  • Use Gradle with Groovy, Clojure, Scala, and languages beyond the JVM, such as Flex and C
  • Get started building a simple Java program using Gradle's command line tooling and a small build script
  • Learn how to configure and construct tasks, Gradle's fundamental unit of build activity
  • Take advantage of Gradle's integration with Ant
  • Use Gradle to integrate with or transition from Maven, and to build software more cleanly
  • Perform application unit and integration tests using JUnit, TestNG, Spock, and Geb