Watch for events, floating down the stream.

June 17, 2021 7:26 PM

Gently Down the Stream: A gentle guide to Apache Kafka.
posted by kaibutsu (16 comments total)

Well, that's adorable.

I still don't fully understand Kafka or how it's used, but should I ever want to dig into it, this will give me a bit of a framework (a very cute framework!) to start with.

I would like to hang out with those otters.

Thanks for posting this, kaibutsu!
posted by kristi at 7:58 PM on June 17, 2021 [3 favorites]

I'm very down for this. More technical concepts ought be taught with otters. Perhaps all of them.
posted by CrystalDave at 8:38 PM on June 17, 2021 [5 favorites]

I love offbeat technical books

why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby and The Little Schemer are great, though The Story About Ping strangely seems to predate the internet utility by decades.
posted by colophon at 8:46 PM on June 17, 2021 [5 favorites]

"Kafka" being a bureaucratic nightmare is a source of endless amusement to my nontechnical friends.

See also hating on this girl Cassandra because she can't get her shit together.
posted by poe at 9:14 PM on June 17, 2021 [5 favorites]

I love offbeat technical books

FORTRAN IV represent
posted by flabdablet at 9:41 PM on June 17, 2021

Next I would like a book about beavers and logs processing

Let's not forget Phippy Goes To The Zoo and the slightly more problematic / cringeworthy predecessor Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House.

We (my husband and I) also cannot remember how the consumer group otters re-distribute themselves among the partitions when one goes missing.
posted by batter_my_heart at 9:45 PM on June 17, 2021 [3 favorites]

Also, more otters in infrastructure.
posted by batter_my_heart at 11:39 PM on June 17, 2021

>hating on this girl Cassandra because she can't get her shit together.
Cassandra's eventually consistent, i.e. she's right in the end.

+1 for more Otters. Beavers are industrious but tend to cause blockages.
posted by k3ninho at 4:54 AM on June 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

FORTRAN IV represent

If someone's currently borrowing it, here's another copy. And another!
posted by BiggerJ at 6:34 AM on June 18, 2021

Not to suggest Kafka doesn’t have its uses, but I think I have PTSD from a previous job where adding Kafka to everything, whether it made sense or not, was a cultural shibboleth to prove you were one of the smart people. The main use of Kafka seemed to be as a crutch to avoid improving code that only needed to be asynchronized because it was slow and unreliable to start with. The stack was a nightmare. Onboarding juniors was next to impossible, and literally nobody understood how it all worked.
posted by gelfin at 8:46 AM on June 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

I have a strong desire to create a similar guide for Jira and work tracking tools in general.

In high school you get homework from multiple teachers who don't co-ordinate with each other. Imagine how poorly that would work out in most companies, with no prioritization either. And you were expected to complete all that work, no way to say that you weren't planning to get to a particular piece of work.
posted by mdoar at 10:04 AM on June 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

Not to suggest Kafka doesn’t have its uses, but I think I have PTSD from a previous job where adding Kafka to everything, whether it made sense or not, was a cultural shibboleth to prove you were one of the smart people. The main use of Kafka seemed to be as a crutch to avoid improving code that only needed to be asynchronized because it was slow and unreliable to start with. The stack was a nightmare. Onboarding juniors was next to impossible, and literally nobody understood how it all worked.

I can sympathize, mine was microservices. I know microservices have their uses (I was writting them 15 years ago before they were cool), but boy do I get a twitch when people start bringing them up. Zlib? Microservice! Now instead of calling the lib directly you can call it over the NETWORK! Why is it giving you a 401 error? Talk to cloudops, not my job.
posted by The Power Nap at 12:15 PM on June 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

My Dad brought a copy of the Fortran Colouring Book home from the Waikato Technical Institute when I was a kid, probably in 1979, and it had a formative influence on my life. Even though I didn't lay hands on a computer for several more years.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:25 PM on June 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

Let's not forget Learn You A Haskell For Great Good!, and the various Learn You A... books it inspired.
posted by acb at 4:55 PM on June 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

In high school you get homework from multiple teachers who don't co-ordinate with each other. Imagine how poorly that would work out in most companies, with no prioritization either. And you were expected to complete all that work, no way to say that you weren't planning to get to a particular piece of work.

See? High school does prepare you for real life.

Doing your homework the in the class before it's due? Just In Time Delivery! Writing down different numbers in your chem lab than you actually measured to make the formulas work? Data Science! Writing a TI BASIC program to solve your math homework for you? Devops! Napping whenever the teacher turns off the lights for the projector? 20 percent time!
posted by pwnguin at 7:27 PM on June 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

I am intrigued. I've tried three browsers with no luck. All show a title page with nothing clickable. Anyone have a suggestion for a way to access this?

[Edit: okay, I've figured it out. Sorry for being silly.]
posted by eotvos at 2:07 PM on June 20, 2021