Nov 3, 2022
Why I Joined Decodable
It’s my first week as a software engineer at Decodable, a start-up building a serverless real-time data platform! When I shared this news on social media yesterday, folks were not only super supportive and excited for me (thank you so much for all the nice words and wishes!), but some also asked about the reasons behind my decision for switching jobs and going to a start-up, after having worked for Red Hat for the last few years.
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Sep 6, 2022
An Ideation for Kubernetes-native Kafka Connect
Kafka Connect, part of the Apache Kafka project, is a development framework and runtime for connectors which either ingest data into Kafka clusters (source connectors) or propagate data from Kafka into external systems (sink connectors). A diverse ecosystem of ready-made connectors has come to life on top of Kafka Connect, which lets you connect all kinds of data stores, APIs, and other systems to Kafka in a no-code approach.
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Aug 25, 2022
Testing Kafka Connectors
Kafka Connect is a key factor for the wide-spread adoption of Apache Kafka: a framework and runtime environment for connectors, it makes the task of getting data either into Kafka or out of Kafka solely a matter of configuration, rather than a bespoke programming job. There’s dozens, if not hundreds, of readymade source and sink connectors, allowing you to create no-code data pipelines between all kinds of databases, APIs, and other systems.
There may be situations though where there is no existing connector matching your requirements, in which case you can implement your own custom connector using the Kafka Connect framework. Naturally, this raises the question of how to test such a Kafka connector, making sure it propagates the data between the connected external system and Kafka correctly and completely. In this blog post I’d like to focus on testing approaches for Kafka Connect source connectors, i.e. connectors like Debezium, which ingest data from an external system into Kafka. Very similar strategies can be employed for testing sink connectors, though.
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Jun 23, 2022
Ten Tips to Make Conference Talks Suck Less
Every so often, I come across some conference talk which is highly interesting in terms of its actual contents, but which unfortunately is presented in a less than ideal way. I’m thinking of basic mistakes here, such as the presenter primarily looking at their slides rather than at the audience. I’m always feeling a bit sorry when this happens, as I firmly believe that everyone can do good and even great talks, just by being aware of — and thus avoiding — a few common mistakes, and sticking to some simple principles.
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May 27, 2022
Loom and Thread Fairness
Update Jun 3: This post is discussed on Reddit and Hacker News
Project Loom (JEP 425) is probably amongst the most awaited feature additions to Java ever; its implementation of virtual threads (or "green threads") promises developers the ability to create highly concurrent applications, for instance with hundreds of thousands of open HTTP connections, sticking to the well-known thread-per-request programming model, without having to resort to less familiar and often more complex to use reactive approaches.
Having been in the workings for several years, Loom got merged into the mainline of OpenJDK just recently and is available as a preview feature in the latest Java 19 early access builds. I.e. it’s the perfect time to get your hands onto virtual threads and explore the new feature. In this post I’m going to share an interesting aspect I learned about thread scheduling fairness for CPU-bound workloads running on Loom.
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May 17, 2022
Running JDK Mission Control on Apple M1
JDK Mission Control (JMC) is invaluable for analysing performance data recording using JDK Flight Recorder (JFR). The other day, I ran into a problem when trying to run JMC on my Mac Mini M1. Mostly for my own reference, here’s what I did to overcome it.
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Mar 10, 2022
The Code Review Pyramid
When it comes to code reviews, it’s a common phenomenon that there is much focus and long-winded discussions around mundane aspects like code formatting and style, whereas important aspects (does the code change do what it is supposed to do, is it performant, is it backwards-compatible for existing clients, and many others) tend to get less attention.
To raise awareness for the issue and providing some guidance on aspects to focus on, I shared a small visual on Twitter the other day, which I called the "Code Review Pyramid".
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Feb 20, 2022
The JDK Flight Recorder File Format
The JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) is one of Java’s secret weapons; deeply integrated into the Hotspot VM, it’s a high-performance event collection framework, which lets you collect metrics on runtime aspects like object allocation and garbage collection, class loading, file and network I/O, and lock contention, do method profiling, and much more.
JFR data is persisted in recording files (since Java 14, also "realtime" event streaming is supported), which can be loaded for analysis into tools like JDK Mission Control (JMC), or the jfr utility coming with OpenJDK itself.
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Jan 12, 2022
What's in a Good Error Message?
Update Jan 13: This post is discussed on Reddit
Update Feb 7: This post is discussed on Hacker News
As software developers, we’ve all come across those annoying, not-so-useful error messages when using some library or framework: "Couldn’t parse config file", "Lacking permission for this operation", etc. Ok, ok, so something went wrong apparently; but what exactly? What config file? Which permissions? And what should you do about it? Error messages lacking this kind of information quickly create a feeling of frustration and helplessness.
So what makes a good error message then? To me, it boils down to three pieces of information which should be conveyed by an error message:
Context: What led to the error? What was the code trying to do when it failed?
The error itself: What exactly failed?
Mitigation: What needs to be done in order to overcome the error?
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Dec 21, 2021
Announcing the First Release of kcctl
🧸 It’s Casey. Casey Cuddle.
I am very happy to announce the first stable release of kcctl, a modern and intuitive command line client for Apache Kafka Connect!
Forget about having to memorize and type the right REST API paths and curl flags; with kcctl, managing your Kafka connectors is done via concise and logically structured commands, modeled after the semantics of the kubectl tool known from Kubernetes.
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