I recently participated in Beam College for the third time and want to share what makes this online event so valuable. For me, Beam College is all about reconnecting with a fantastic community, picking up new technologies, and exchanging experiences with other Beam users. Being the only one at my company working with Beam and Dataflow makes these connections especially meaningful. This year was particularly special as we also had a hackathon with tough challenges and impressive rewards, with the first-place team taking home $1,500 USD! 🤓
Beam College is a free, online educational program offering hands-on training in Apache Beam data processing. The curriculum features online sessions (later available on-demand). It’s ideal for software developers new to data processing, data scientists seeking production-ready streaming solutions, data engineers exploring Beam’s place in their tool ecosystem, and existing Beam/Dataflow users wanting to master advanced features. The 2025 edition of Beam College included a hackathon where participants built data processing solutions and competed for prizes.
Beam College 2025 offered 2 tracks with live and pre-recorded sessions:
- May 15th: Apache Beam Fundamentals track
- May 16th: New features and integrations track
The weekend was dedicated to the hackathon. Saturday was devoted to collaborative work between participants and mentors, leading to project presentations and the selection of winners on Sunday.
On the first day, participants learned about Beam fundamentals. Mehran Nazir highlighted Apache Beam’s important role in generative AI. Sascha Kerbler showed participants how to create Beam pipelines using Spark, Flink, and SDKs across various languages. Kerry Donny-Clark and Danny McCormick demonstrated building ML pipelines for audio processing with LLMs. Israel Herraiz presented streaming inference using Beam with Google AI Studio’s Gemini model. To wrap up the day, Yi Hu described the transition from batch to streaming, covering unbounded sources, windowing strategies, and trigger mechanisms.
Source Credit: https://medium.com/google-cloud/beam-college-2025-online-training-hackathon-b89d81cebac1?source=rss—-e52cf94d98af—4
