As this year started, I challenged myself to develop and keep a small but steady writing throughput that feels good and manageable over time. This month I decided to start these log posts to share what I’ve been up to and what may come next. Let’s get started!
Recent posts
With the release of this site I was looking into topics to start publishing. I picked something which I’ve been working on for a while: Apache Kafka with a focus on performance.
There are a couple of posts from the past months:
Benchmarking Kafka: Getting started with OpenMessaging Benchmark
I’ve been working on benchmarking Kafka for a year or so and have found the OpenMessaging Benchmark (OMB) framework quite useful, so I decided to start a series where I could share how I’ve been using this tool.
This is the first post where I share a bit on the OMB architecture and how to get started. If you’re looking for ways to quickly put some workload on a Kafka cluster, this may be interesting for you.
TIL: Tuning Linux Networking stack may help to fix Kafka’s URP
Inspired by Simon Willison’s TIL blog—one of many ways one could be inspired by Simon’s work—I also started a more lightweight type of posts.
This post shares learnings from troubleshooting a network bottleneck on a Kafka cluster, and how tuning the network stack at the kernel level helped us to bring the cluster back to healthy state. There’s much to learn and test around these networking features, but this post serves as a good teaser.
Recent links
Simon calls these bookmarks
A couple of things here:
The Basics by Thorsten Ball
This was a great post and better reminder on practices that will make our job better in different ways. I picked a few I personally wanted to highlight, but I recommend reading all.
GitHub Markdown quote syntax
Something I find myself searching again and again is the syntax to add formatting to quotes on GitHub Markdown, so I added a link to remember.
What may come next
I’d like to continue the benchmarking Kafka series covering Workload types, how workload distribution works, and more internals that I find interesting.
Let’s see what can be achieved.
Personal notes
Seems that the random photos I tend to take on the street may have found a place as Bluesky has released Flashes. You can find me there at @jeqo89.bsky.social. The snow and “warm” winter have given some nice views this month. I’ll mix new ones with some old pics from my backlog.
In other news, this beginning of March marks my second year at Aiven. It has been quite a journey as I shifted from Solution Architect and Consultant into a Software Engineering role. Not without ups and downs, but I find myself working on relevant projects with great, smart colleagues that make this journey worth it. I’m excited for what’s coming, let’s go!