rmoff's random ramblings

At Decodable we migrated our docs platform onto Antora.

A friend messaged me late last night with the scary news that Google had emailed him about a ton of spammy subdomains on his own domain.

Why should the Java folk have all the fun?!

Antora is a modern documentation site generator with many nice features including sourcing documentation content from one or more separate git repositories.

This post originally appeared on the Decodable blog.

AI, what a load of hyped-up bollocks, right?

I’ve used Hugo for my blog for several years now, and it’s great.

As a newcomer to Apache Flink one of the first things I did was join the Slack community (which is vendor-neutral and controlled by the Flink PMC).

This post originally appeared on the Decodable blog.

Sometimes you might want to access Apache Kafka that’s running on your local machine from another device not on the same network.

When I started my journey learning Apache Flink one of the things that several people expressed an interest in hearing more about was PyFlink.

So far I’ve plotted out a bit of a map for my exploration of Apache Flink, looked at what Flink is, and run my first Flink application.

🎉 I just ran my first Apache Flink cluster and application on it 🎉

A brief diversion from my journey learning Apache Flink to document an interesting zsh oddity that briefly tripped me up: cd: string not in pwd: flink-1.17.1

My journey with Apache Flink begins with an overview of what Flink actually is.

Like a fortunate child on Christmas Day, I’ve got a brand new toy!

This week I joined Decodable.

Writing is one of the most powerful forms of communication, and it’s useful in a multitude of roles and contexts.

This was originally titled more broadly “What Does A DevEx Engineer Do”, but that made it into a far too tedious and long-winding etymological exploration of the discipline.

Wordpress still, to an extent, rules the blogging world.

One of the most important ways that a project can help its developers is providing them good documentation.

No great insights in this post, just something for folk who Google this error after me and don’t want to waste three hours chasing their tails… 😄

Here’s a neat little trick you can use with DuckDB to convert a CSV file into a Parquet file: COPY (SELECT * FROM read_csv('~/data/source.csv',AUTO_DETECT=TRUE)) TO '~/data/target.parquet' (FORMAT 'PARQUET', CODEC 'ZSTD');

It all started with a tweet.

What do you do when you want to query over multiple parquet files but the schemas don’t quite line up?

As we enter December and 2022 draws to a close, so does a significant chapter in my working career—later this month I’ll be leaving Confluent and onto pastures new.

In my quest to bring myself up to date with where the data & analytics engineering world is at nowadays, I’m going to build on my exploration of the storage and access technologies and look at the tools we use for loading and transforming data.

I started my dbt journey by poking and pulling at the pre-built jaffle_shop demo running with DuckDB as its data store.

I’ve been wanting to try out dbt for some time now, and a recent long-haul flight seemed like the obvious opportunity to do so.

At Current 2022 the audience was given the option to submit ratings.

This is one of those you had to be there moments.

At Current 22 a few of us will be going for an early run on Tuesday morning.

With my foray into the current world of data engineering I wanted to get my hands dirty with some of the tools and technologies I’d been reading about.

As I’ve been reading and exploring the current world of data engineering I’ve been adding links to my Raindrop.io collection, so check that out.

In this article I look at where we store our analytical data, how we organise it, and how we enable access to it.

For the past 5.5 years I’ve been head-down in the exciting area of stream processing and events, and I realised recently that the world of data and analytics that I worked in up to 2017 which was changing significantly back then (Big Data, y’all!)

Airtable is a rather wonderful tool.

If you’ve ever been to a conference, particularly as a speaker whose submitted a paper that may or may not have been accepted, you might wonder quite how conferences choose the talks that get accepted.

(src) Lightning talks are generally 5-10 minutes.

Building the program for any conference is not an easy task.

I’m convinced that a developer advocate can be effective remotely.

I recently started writing an abstract for a conference later this year and realised that I’m not even sure if I want to do it.

This blog is written in Asciidoc, built using Hugo, and hosted on GitHub Pages.

Kafka Summit London IS BACK!

This is the software counterpart to my previous article in which I looked at my workstation’s hardware setup.

I’ve used Alfred for years, and it’s one of the first apps I’ll install on a fresh Mac.

There’s a bunch of improvements in the works for how ksqlDB handles code deployments and migrations.

The FilePulse connector from Florian Hussonnois is a really useful connector for Kafka Connect which enables you to ingest flat files including CSV, JSON, XML, etc into Kafka.

Using ksqlDB in Confluent Cloud makes things a whole bunch easier because now you just get to build apps and streaming pipelines, instead of having to run and manage a bunch of infrastructure yourself.

The ActiveMQ source connector creates a Struct holding the value of the message from ActiveMQ (as well as its key).