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…

The Aggregation of Marginal Gains is an improvement model attributed to Dave Brailsford. When he took over as the head of British Cycling in 2002, the team was near the bottom of the rankings. Brailsford’s approach was to look at their processes in tiny detail, and improve each part by 1%, the logic being that…

We’ve recently been rolling out a new internal application. At our organisation, users have an email address which is generally firstname.lastname@company.com, or something like that. When a user logs in to the application, the app will look them up using their email address and figure out what parts of the application the user should be…

When i think back to the deepest of the many deep holes i’ve dug myself in to over the years, they almost all start with an email. When working through my inbox, it’s all too easy to just bash out a reply and hit send. Usually, that’s fine – a quick email is all it…

Generally when evaluating someone for a role, I look for 5 things: Behaviours – how do they operate in a team? Do they admit to mistakes and learn from them? Do they help others? Communicate and live to their personal values? Are those values ones I want people in the team to live to? Accountability…

I often have conversations with friends and colleagues about their careers. And many times, i point people to a great blog post by my colleague Liz Aab, about the “7 Ps”. But i always find myself adding two to the list, so i thought i’d just post it here. There are lots of factors which…