8 ms·
Understanding Kafka with Factorio (2019)
- priyankt68 5y agoBeautiful explanation through analogies a s graphics supporting it. Thanks a lot
- rememberlenny 5y agoThis is a wonderful format for explaining software engineering practices and I hope to see more like this.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- everyone 5y ago"Kafka" *really* doesnt seem like a good name for some software that is supposed to be good / helpful.
- jeppesen-io 5y agoIt really does not matter Who in their right mind would conflate the two
- opan 5y agoI opened the thread thinking it was about the guy, not that I know a lot about either Kafka. I know what Factorio is, but I thought maybe it'd be philosophical and use analogies. Like if someone wrote about understanding feudalism through Animal Crossing.
- ronenlh 5y agoHere’s the HN discussion for Bartosz Milewski’s analysis of Factorio, where he shows functional counterparts in Haskell of Factorio’s patterns: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26157969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26157969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29299140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29299140
- solmag 5y agoI am not kidding when I say that you can probably use Factorio in your technical interview as a company, lol.
- txdv 5y agolinkedin resume with total hours played
- buzer 5y agoThere was a post about that in HN a while back. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591966
- mcv 5y agoI missed that back then. Interesting idea, but I'm a senior developer with 20 years of experience, and my 12 year old son is better at Factorio than I am, so I'm not so sure about this. But it's interesting to compare his factorio style to mine. Or my factorio style to my regular programming style. They're very different.
- marcosdumay 5y agoYou won't get good on the game if you don't have any aptitude to programming. But being bad at the game means nothing, and it certainly doesn't reflect any expertise, just basic aptitude. It also only reflects one of the many tasks a developer usually does as an employee, that is creating algorithms. For a senior developer, that's probably not an apt task for differentiation, because it's quite bounded.
- geodel 5y agoMust be something about Kafka to attract these kind of explanations. Another one few months back was a children's book on Kafka [1] . For me it just look like solution looking for actual problems. I wonder if Kafka represents an existential angst in these Kubernetized Microservice times. Or is it more simply I am just too dumb to learn and use this shit correctly. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27541339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27541339
- Hamuko 5y agoThe otters definitely overengineered the living crap out of their party notifications.
- geodel 5y agoTurns out some otters did have doubt. But "if Linkedin use Kafka, it must be Good" clinched the deal.
- joking 5y agothe same can be said about microservices.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bimboler38 5y agoThis is exactly what I thought. Maybe it's because it's popular or maybe it's because the docs are notoriously bad. Or both.
- berkes 5y agoWhen you are wondering whether you might need Kafka, it is certain that you don't need it. But there are times when you have a problem, and amongst the possible solutions is Kafka. I've come across Kafkaesque problems only three times in the last seven years: a hosting platform that had to parse logs of over 700 WordPress sites for security and other businesslogic. Putting all events of a financial app backend into datalakes and filtering and parsing all openstreetmap changesets live.
- mangecoeur 5y agoThey say to get all the subtleties of kafka you should read the original german ;)
- rad_gruchalski 5y agoBut Kai Waehner blogs in English :)
- tr33house 5y agoIf anyone is starting a new project, I'd recommend looking into Apache Pulsar [0]. It has all the good parts of Kafka with a lot more features useful when scaling 0: https://pulsar.apache.org/ https://pulsar.apache.org/
- solmag 5y agoI've been looking for non-JVM replacement for Kafka, though I might also give this a try.
- incognito_limey 5y agoI'll just leave this here: https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1464109933390036996 https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1464109933390036996
- rektide 5y agoAh yes, fear uncertainty & doubt. The number one, two, and three arguments (not necessarily in that order) against progress & the better.
- sohkamyung 5y agoI presume the percentage of HN user who know this is about Apache Kafka is higher than the percentage that think this is about Franz Kafka. :-) Related HN discussion of this [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29296969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29296969
- agentdrek 5y agoThe Kafka subreddit is good for chuckles because at least once a month someone happens by who is looking for help with their deployment. It's a Kafkaesque loop.
- robertlagrant 5y agoI genuinely thought it was going to be an introduction to Franz Kafka.
- marcosdumay 5y agoMe too, and I came here because I thought it was almost impossible to explain Kafka with Factorio (can one explain Kafka at all?) But yeah, parallel programming is easy to explain with Factorio.
- Vagabundos 5y agoVery useful article! Awesome job
- m1k1 5y agoEverything with Factorio in name gets my upvote.
- beebmam 5y agoKafka is awesome, but I have one major gripe with it. It gives a solid interface to JVM applications. But if your application is outside of the JVM and you want it to consume from a topic, it's a terrible experience.
- kitd 5y agoI have found clients based on librdkafka [1] or sarama [2] to be pretty robust and capable. For SSL, librdkafka relies heavily on OpenSSL which can cause a few headaches IME. But the rest is straightforward. [1] https://github.com/edenhill/librdkafka https://github.com/edenhill/librdkafka [2] https://github.com/Shopify/sarama https://github.com/Shopify/sarama
- 2-718-281-828 5y agoThis analogy is as thin and trivial as it is disappointing. Those concepts could have and have been easily understandably explained in a single paragraph. Don't even see the appeal. This analogy is not providing any new or interesting insights whatsoever.
- NoboruWataya 5y agoAlways disappointed when I see titles like this and realise they are talking about Apache Kafka.