Thomas Wong Blog

August 8th, 2025

Kafka: When max.in.flight Breaks Your Message Order

Discover why setting max.in.flight.requests.per.connection > 5 can break your Kafka message ordering and how Fortune 500 companies handle this critical parameter.

July 17th, 2025

[KAFKA INTERNALS] - Understanding Kafka Cluster Membership: How Brokers Join and Leave the Cluster

Deep dive into Kafka's cluster membership mechanism, exploring how brokers register, maintain heartbeats, and handle failures in both ZooKeeper and KRaft modes

June 30th, 2025

Implementing Consumer Groups and Observing Kafka Rebalancing

A practical guide to implementing consumer groups and understanding Kafka's rebalancing mechanism

June 27th, 2025

Building a Real-Time Web Events Pipeline with Kafka and Python

How I built a web events Kafka pipeline with Python - from setup to real-time processing