By default, Kafka attempts to send records as soon as possible, sending up to max.in.flight.requests.per.connection messages per connection. If you attempt to send more than this, the producer will start batching messages, but ultimately if you saturate the connection so there are unacknowledged message batches pending, the producer enters blocking mode.

We can optimise the way the producer batches messages to achieve higher throughput through two settings, batch.size and linger.ms.

linger.ms is the number of milliseconds that the producer waits for more messages before sending a batch. By default, this value is 0, meaning that the producer attempts to send messages immediately. Smaller batches have higher overhead - they are less compressible, and there’s an overhead associated with processing and acknowledging them. Under moderate load, messages may not come frequent enough to fill a batch immediately, but by introducing a small delay (e.g. 50ms), we can increase the likelihood that the producer can batch more messages together, improving throughput.

Claude Code is pretty amazing. It’s let me build prototypes and improve apps faster than I ever thought possible. But I was wondering - what else can it do?

I’ve been using Emby for years, but recently I started to wonder what happened to Jellyfin, the project that forked Emby years ago. So i decided to ask Claude Code to help me by setting up a debate and mediating the answer.

Although builds were succeeding locally, during CI builds were failing on Linux with the error Error: Cannot find module @rollup/rollup-linux-x64-gnu. npm has a bug related to optional dependencies. The log suggested removing package-lock.json - but this obviously breaks deterministic builds.

The root cause is a missing dependency - specifically, when Rollup needs native binaries for performance optimisation. Mac-generated lockfiles won’t include Linux-specific optional dependencies. First noted in npm bug 4828, it was fixed in npm 11.3.0+, but adding an explicit optional dependency prevents edge cases.

I was recently asked to design a method to meet ITAC (IT Application Controls) standards for critical data flows in our organisation. ITAC are application-level controls looking mainly at how we ensure the completeness, accuracy and validity of transactions - for example, invoices or trades. Our control set is based on the ICFR principles, of which ITAC is one part.

The specific control objective I was asked to look at relates to the risk of loss of integrity of financial data transfers. The focus on the integrity of the data, not authenticity or non-repudiation is really important as it means cryptographic solutions aren’t required - Kafka’s native protocol features can satisfy the requirements.