Random musings of a restless mind.
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Lego Space Shuttle Bag 1
Build date: 2022-09-10 Bag 1 – The stand for the Hubble Space Telescope. I’m amazed at the engineering that Lego put into this to support one particular angle. Looking at this as an adult, I’m amazed at the implied complexity of the industrial process that brought all of these perfectly engineered pieces together into one […]
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Lego Space Shuttle Intro
Build date: 2022-09-10 Father-son quality time. Now I’m going to do an epic Space Shuttle Lego build, inspired by @markawest‘s Millenium Falcon a while back. 2354 pieces. LFG! The assembly manual is 318 pages long! I’m super excited about this. My mum and sister bought it for my birthday. For a kid that ate up […]
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Lego Space Shuttle Mega-Build
Earlier this year, I received a NASA Space Shuttle Discovery Lego kit from my mum and sister as a birthday present. It’s BIG – 2354 pieces! I thought this would be an awesome thing to spend a bit of time with my son on – it’s 17 bags of bricks, so a bag each weekend […]
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New Start; Help Wanted
As some of you may know, I recently shut down my old company Ameliant, and have joined Confluent – the Good People behind Apache Kafka – as a Solutions Architect. So far, after 5 weeks I like what I have seen. A group of very nice (important), smart people, and a company that has learned […]
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New Book – Understanding Message Brokers
If this blog has been unusually quiet over the last few months, it is with good reason – I wrote another book! Understanding Message Brokers has just been released for FREE download by O’Reilly. It is a 70 page concentrated brain dump of how to reason about messaging, based on a presentation I gave at […]
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Adam
Born early morning on Monday the 21st of November. Mum and baby doing very well. The girls are massively excited to have a little brother!
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A Milestone
Last week I completed a consulting engagement with my 100th client since starting work in this field 5.5 years ago. Looking at these last few years in hindsight, it feels like an unfathomable point to be at. I am struck by how much I have learned and how my perspective has developed. It has been […]
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Beyond the Hype Cycle; Co-operative Open Source
At some point in the lifetime of an open-source project, having survived rewrites, deployments in hundreds of organisations, battle-testing… it becomes boring. The sheen goes off it, and people move on to the newer and shinier. When this happens, the number of maintainers drops off, releases slow down to a trickle, and issues or improvements […]
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Performance Test Tool for Apache Kafka
Towards the end of last year, I developed a performance test tool which is available at GitHub for testing the behaviour of Apache Kafka (0.9 so far). The tool was inspired by, and informed by some of the limitations of, the performance tooling in ActiveMQ, which I’m currently retrofitting with the same mechanisms. The kafka-perf-test […]
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Message Distribution and Topic Partitioning in Kafka
When coming over to Apache Kafka from other messaging systems, there’s a conceptual hump that needs to first be crossed, and that is – what is a this topic thing that messages get sent to, and how does message distribution inside it work? Unlike regular brokers, Kafka only has one destination type – a topic […]