u/StrikingStand4346

Hi everyone, I have been using Kafka at work for quite some time now and was wondering if there's any slack or discord community to connect with contributors and maintainers for the project. I have seen that other Apache projects like Airflow have a pretty active slack community for discussion and guidance for beginners interested in open source contributions. So do we have something similar for kafka where I can connect and potentially ask questions if I want to contribute to the code?

For those who work or have interviewed with startups, how is the experience different from FAANG or similar companies? How is the experience working at startups as a junior developer in the current market with so much going on with AI?

I am a junior developer currently working at a large company in finance and lately I have been looking at job postings from startups. I am seeing requirements are all over the place unlike big tech companies that just need you to grind leetcode and system design so I am finding it difficult to decide what to focus on for studying if I want to work at a startup in the near future. I enjoy reading about system design and code for open source tools like kafka, airflow, spark, etc. in my free time over grinding leetcode so I am not going to make it to big tech. I can still solve mediums and startups don't seem to focus too much on leetcode the way big tech does. There's not much to do where I live currently and no in person networking options so I want to move to big cities like SF or NYC so I figured I can spend time on upskilling and have been wondering what to focus on.

In my current job, I was lucky to work on a green field project so I have shipped features in prod end to end and written ci/cd pipelines and got to cover lots of topics in terms of breadth. What would you guys recommend going into depth to make my resume appealing to startups?