Writing
Notes from production: Go, Kafka, stream processing, and the reliability work behind payment and lending systems.
Running a service on your laptop, no VPN
Most services at a fintech lending platform could not boot without a VPN to shared dev infrastructure. One service could run its whole stack and its integration tests on a laptop with a few commands. Here is the pattern behind it, and why the tools do not matter.
The dead-letter that could not deliver
How a missing dead-letter topic froze two Kafka partitions in a strict-ordered Redpanda Connect pipeline, and the bounded fallback that fixes the class.
Eight hours frozen: a Redpanda Connect and sarama deadlock
A stream-processing consumer stopped consuming for eight hours with no crash and a green health probe. The cause was a deadlock between Benthos's autoretry mutex and sarama's synchronous checkpointer on a consumer-group rebalance.
Your first Kafka consumer with Redpanda Connect
A beginner tutorial: consume messages from a Kafka topic and print each one to stdout, with no code to compile. Just a short YAML file and rpk.
Querying moving data: keyset pagination for a daily sweep
A daily job re-evaluated 1.87 million rows and silently skipped some, because it paginated with OFFSET on a column it was updating mid-scan. Keyset pagination fixed it.
Killing a fat Kafka event at the byte level
How a high-volume loan-state consumer stopped running out of memory, with a two-pass byte strip in Bloblang and a thin-struct mirror in Go.