Kafka

Variable-length unsigned 64-bit ints — small numbers stay small on the wire.

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.

Shrink Kafka integer payloads with a compact encoding library for Java/Kafka apps.

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 Problem: Getting Real-time Data into Kafka # Have you ever tried to stream Wikipedia changes or other real-time Server-Sent Events (SSE) updates into Kafka? If you have, you probably wrote custom Kafka producer and consumer code to handle these events, managed reconnections, and built your own error handling.

Integration testing is crucial for Kafka Connectors to ensure they work correctly with external systems. This guide provides a comprehensive approach to setting up and executing integration tests for Kafka Connectors, covering everything from environment setup to best practices for testing source and sink connectors.

A step‑by‑step guide to using FastMCP and the MCP protocol to expose Kafka operations (topic management, produce/consume, troubleshooting) as LLM‑accessible tools.

Expose Kafka cluster operations as LLM-accessible tools via the Model Context Protocol.

A real-time multiplayer tap battle that turns every click into a Kafka event you can inspect.

A practical guide to creating tombstone records for Kafka compacted topics using the kafka-console-producer.sh command-line tool with the null marker feature

Key + null value = tombstone. Use null.marker so the CLI can send it.

Apache Kafka is a powerful distributed event streaming platform, and Kafka Connect makes it easy to integrate Kafka with external systems. While many pre-built connectors exist, real-world applications often need custom connectors tailored for proprietary systems, custom logic, or advanced error handling. That’s where this production-ready template comes in—it removes the boilerplate and gives you everything you need to build, test, and deploy connectors with ease.