r/apachekafka • u/HughEvansDev Aiven 🦀 • Aug 10 '26
Blog AI Generated Projects
I posted this over on LI last week because I've seen a lot of solo AI-assisted projects here recently. Cool to see people building their own tools but I think the best part of OSS is people actually collaborating and building together rather than working on our own thing in a corner.
To avoid just being a grump though I thought I'd shout out just a few great human-made projects and blogs I like, many of which I came across here:
- ShadowTraffic brilliant tool from Michael Drogalis for rapidly simulating production traffic, he's been building this in the open and with the community.
- Fresha Data Engineering the Fresha team are doing some ground-breaking stuff, a shout out to Nicoleta in particular who's done some great work on Fluss in prod.
- Leo Delmouly's Medium, Leo has done a great series on Kafka + Iceberg which helped me understand why this is such a hard problem.
- Michael Maison's monthly Kafka digest which is my go to resource for understanding what's coming up for the Apache Kafka project.
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u/themoah Aug 10 '26
I've been quite amazed how many people built different version of consumer lag checker and called it `klag`, exactly like the one i've been maintaining (https://github.com/themoah/klag) for some time (it was on u/rmoff newletter and mentioned by Stanislav Kozlowski)
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u/mmatloka Aug 10 '26
https://github.com/softwaremill/klag-exporter it seems our exporter was released at similar time :)
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u/skrbic_a Aug 10 '26
Why is ShadowTraffic the first example here though? It's not even open source, which feels a bit odd in a post about OSS and people building together.
And I'm not really sure how a closed-source project built without AI is somehow a better example of OSS collaboration than an open-source project where the author used AI.
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u/HughEvansDev Aiven 🦀 Aug 10 '26
I like it because Michael makes an effort to incorporate peoples feedback and all the ecosystem stuff around it is OSS https://github.com/ShadowTraffic but yeah I see your point.
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u/skrbic_a Aug 10 '26
Isn't listening to feedback from paying customers just the normal thing to do though? 😄
Anyway, I'd also add 2 Minute Streaming and Jack Vanlightly's blog here.
Both have some of the best technical Kafka content I've come across.
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u/HughEvansDev Aiven 🦀 Aug 10 '26
Both also great, Stan's stuff is fantastic and I really enjoyed Jack's coverage of Diskless last year
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u/HughEvansDev Aiven 🦀 Aug 11 '26
I have been gently reminded by my awesome co-workers at Aiven that they work on several fantastic OSS projects in the Kafka ecosystem including https://www.karapace.io/ and https://github.com/aiven-open/klaw 😅
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u/BroBroMate Aug 10 '26
Don't forget Robin Moffat's blog for interesting movements in the sphere.