iainschmitt.com

A Wasted Weekend on Kafka Back when I was at SPS, I spun up a single-broker cluster on my DigitalOcean VPS to get a better handle on Apache Kafka.

Terry Rozier and the Teleprompt Operator On October 23rd, 2025, the US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York indicted five people as part of a sports gambling conspiracy.

July 2026 Earnings for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon In the week of July 20th, the big three American mobile network operators (MNOs) announced earnings for the second quarter of 2026.

Non-performant software and its incentives I end up re-listening to Episode #78 of Software Unscripted at least once a year.

Manifest 2026 Recap For the second time this year, I made it out to the Bay Area for a conference.

Photography My first proper digital camera was a Canon Rebel T1i.

The Great Token Wager In the first half of 2026 the AI infrastructure buildout has been firmly top of mind.1 The November 2022 launch of ChatGPT brought large-language models into the spotlight, and with each passing year you could feel the diffusion into…

RSS Scraper Development Notes Artemis.bm is a strange website and I wish that more industries had a counterpart: the website tracks the insurance-linked security (ILS) and catastrophe bond industries.

A few thoughts from JavaOne 2026 Last month SPS sent me and a staff engineer to JavaOne, the main Java language conference held at the Oracle campus in Redwood City, California.

February 2026 Puro Notes Last July I wrote the following in Kafka in One File: It all made me think that surely someone has created a high-quality, open-source "SQLite of Kafka" because that is exactly what I want.

Review of The Shenzhen Experiment For all the attention paid to America's semiconductor reliance on Taiwan and the military consequences of selling advanced Nvidia GPUs to China, I've found it unusual how comparatively little effort has been placed in com…

Vibe code at your peril At every software company that I have worked at, if something is going wrong the customer has a named person who is responsible for getting the problem fixed.

On Automation At the founding of the country, 9 out of 10 Americans lived on a farm, but as of 2022, fewer than 2% of Americans made their living farming.

My Rough and Incomplete Backend Developer Skill Tree A few weeks back, an associate software engineer was asking me for advice on the types of side projects that would build relevant skills in his backend role.

Uncomfortably Functional Kotlin SPS hosts an informal, internal technology conference every year.

T-Mobile's Fiber Ambitions US Internet (USI) is a regional ISP based out of Minnetonka, a western suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

August Event Stream Notes Kafka Consumer Group Offset Durability A few weeks back I read Taylor Troesh's "How/Why to Sweep Async Tasks Under a Postgres Table".

Kafka in One File On a piece of software whose lack of existence confuses me.

The English Civil Wars and the Republic That Failed In May 1660, Sir Thomas Fairfax crossed the English Channel with eleven other men to formally invite King Charles II to reclaim the throne.

The next big asset class?

Software Firms and Subjective Judgement If the CEO of LG wants to add a new button to the remote on one of their TV models, this will require prototyping the new remote, designing changes to the PCB and plastic casing, getting on the same page with their…

Prism Proxy Bug: STOP-2386 A few disclaimers to start - nothing in this blog post discloses proprietary information from either SPS or our customers, and I did get company permission prior to writing this.

First Thoughts on The Little Book of Semaphores and Rust In my review of Domain Modeling Made Functional, I made the following comment about Rust: This has made me realise that I would much rather learn a new language by diving into a problem area that it…

This blog's new syntax highlighting This blog is written from scratch with my custom static site generator, and up until a few days ago I was using Prism for client-side syntax highlighting. 1 This added about 34.3 kB of JavaScript to support F#, TypeScri…

LLM Chat Interfaces Will Change Grant Sanderson is the mind behind 3Blue1Brown, a math YouTube channel featuring exceptional visualisation and animation created with his own animation library, Manim. 1 In October 2024 he published a walkthrough video of a…

The Strangest Carrier: Southern Linc Any firm's contingency plans or redundant infrastructure says a lot about the business that they are in and what tradeoffs they are faced with.

Understanding monads?

My needlessly complicated ZooKeeper-enabled reverse proxy Self-Hosting and Apache ZooKeeper Background After moving my personal website to my home DMZ network over a public cloud reverse proxy, I have increased my self-hosted footprint.

Reinventing the wheel to go back in time Back in the 90s, you had to deal with any number of problems that are foreign to the software engineers of today: the idea that a bug in the Linux TCP/IP libraries could explain some undesired behaviour in your code

Mobile Network Operators and Capex Tradeoffs A discussion of why being a wireless carrier is such a tough business, and what lessons about the industry from both sides of the Atlantic can teach us about electrical utilities.

November Grab Bag There are a couple of topics that were cut from drafts of the previous two posts.

October 2024 GDPLE Development GDPLE is my Wordle-inspired US state economy guessing game that I wrote last year, but this October I did some work on both the frontend and backend that I thought warranted a blog post.

Review of Domain Modeling Made Functional Domain Modeling Made Functional: Tackle Software Complexity with Domain-Driven Design and F# is a 2018 book by Scott Wlaschin.1 As it says on the tin, the book's goal is to show the reader how to implement domain…