Joel Hanson

A customer reported that their Kafka Connect MQ Sink connector looked completely healthy — no errors on the connector CR, no failed tasks — but no messages were reaching MQ. This had been going on for hours.

Most habit apps want an account, a subscription, and a notification every hour. I built a minimalist challenge tracker that stores everything locally, exports to PDF, and ships free on GitHub Pages.

My wife was losing track of feeds, so I built a one-tap nursing timer that grew into a pumping log, and shipped it for free on GitHub Pages with no database and no app store.

Every Kafka record with a Long value you produce sends 8 bytes over the wire, even when the value is 42. Bijou64 encodes integers in 1–3 bytes with drop-in serializers, cutting network transfer and replication traffic on integer-heavy topics by up to 50% or more.

I built Stream Wars as a tiny tap game to demo how Kafka works, by turning every tap in the browser into a real Kafka event you can inspect.

The Celery Question # For years, when someone asked “How do I handle background tasks in Django?”, the answer was almost always “Use Celery”. And for good reason. Celery is mature, battle-tested, and has solved async task processing for countless Django applications. It has extensive documentation, a large ecosystem of plugins, and most Django developers have at least some experience with it.