Ben Stopford

I wrote a short book on Designing Event Driven Systems which covers Kafka, Streaming, Event Sourcing and a few related topics. If you'd like a free copy you can find one here: confluent.io/designing-even…

🔥 It's finally here! I'm excited to announce that @ShadowTrafficIO is now available. Head to the home page to get started for free. For my entire career, I've been baffled by how long it takes to build demos, load tests, and proof-of-concept projects. Everyone's built little internal data generator tools, but none of them are good. ShadowTraffic is a tasteful, complete product that rapidly simulates production traffic to your backend—@apachekafka, @PostgreSQL, and webhooks. Help me get the word out: 👨‍💻 Hacker News: I'm on the /newest page 🛠️ Product Hunt: I'm listed under Developer Tools 📰 Reshare this post ShadowTraffic was built completely in public in just 90 days, 100% bootstrapped on my own dime. Thank you *so* much for following along guys!

Today I'm launching a new podcast looking at the future of software by talking directly to the devs who are trying to get us there. We kick off with London's hippest new language designer, Louis Pilfold, the creator of Gleam. 🎧 pod.link/developer-voic… 📺 youtu.be/RntfkL8lUY4

Meet @OscilarInc, a company @sackulkarni and I founded with the goal of solving one of the biggest challenges facing businesses and consumers today: how to protect online transactions from fraud, risk and theft forbes.com/sites/phoebeli…

All of the AI improvements are really exciting, but some of the demos I see out there are overblown. Basic litmus test: does it suggest that it'll replace critical thinking? If yes, dead on arrival. Save your attention.

@mattgillard @john_tipper We really appreciate thoughtful feedback and it’d be great to learn more. @MichaelDrogalis may be able to help.

@john_tipper @benstopford Thanks. Happy to chat with anyone who can help with this.

the confluent kafka docs are possibly the worst i have seen. Cannot find anything useful regarding API references.

Our first tutorial in Flink :) developer.confluent.io/tutorials/crea…

I'm declaring the company sticker competition closed. I've just won. This is unbeatable.

Adam's debut on the octolog is a great one!

Do you work with #data––streaming or otherwise? Read on! Come share your technical journey! Whether it's for #streamingdata, #realtimeanalytics, unique pipelines or just something fun, we want to hear about it at #Current23. sessionize.com/current-2023/

BREAKING🚨: Something Just Crashed Into The Moon And Astronomers Captured It blog.physics-astronomy.com/2023/03/breaki…

@xcbsmith @garyolliffe It most certainly does, but assuming you can handle that, events are often a better strategy than moving functionality to synchronous services as it removes runtime complexity. As a simple example, if the shipping service is down, you don't want the orders service to block.

@benstopford @garyolliffe To Gary's point though, you're first encapsulating the logic for these async tasks and establishing prioritization, which is where you're paying off the tech debt. Moving it out to event driven microservices actually adds operational complexity.

Trying to address tech debt in your legacy apps by "refactoring" to microservices?...proceed with extreme caution... Converting your monolithic big ball of mud into a big distributed ball of mud is like paying off your mortgage with your credit card.

The next installment of the octolog is out confluent.io/blog/benefits-…

Cute and useful!

Interesting thread on the performance improvements in Confluent Cloud.

@otavioccc @miguno The guy’s a machine, and an honour to work with.

@benstopford @miguno fun thing is that I certainly wouldn't be working w/ Kafka Streams / Kafka pipelines today if it wasn't for @miguno's blog posts on Apache Storm (damn, life used to be way harder): michael-noll.com/tutorials/runn…

I was looking back at this blog series by @miguno. It remains the best short-form guide to Kafka and data streaming on the internet today. At least in my opinion. michael-noll.com/blog/2020/01/1…

Expensive tricks though...

Interesting chart of Disney vs. Netflix - old dogs learning new tricks. via ben-evans.com/presentations