I’ve spent 17 years building streaming platforms, integration systems, and open-source tooling. A lot of what I’ve learned lives in conference slides, GitHub repos, and conversations that are hard to find again. This blog is where I put it all in one place.
What to expect#
- Kafka internals and production patterns. Not the getting-started guide. The stuff that actually matters when you’re running clusters at scale.
- Observability. What signals to pay attention to when your Kafka cluster looks fine on the surface but isn’t.
- FinOps and chargebacks. Who used what, how much it cost, and how to make that visible across teams.
- Tooling. I build tools (Chitragupta, Kafka Shepherd, broker sizing calculators) because the existing options didn’t solve the problem well enough. I’ll write about why they exist and how they work.
- Lessons learned. Mostly the hard way.
Why now?#
I’ve given talks at Current and Conf42, built open-source tools that people actually use, and I keep running into the same questions. Writing things down once makes more sense than explaining them over and over.
There’s also just the urge to share what I learn. That’s been a constant through my career, and a blog is the right format for it.
First real post is on the way.