I’ve been playing around with the new SerDes (serialisers/deserialisers) that shipped with Confluent Platform 5.5 - Protobuf, and JSON Schema (these were added to the existing support for Avro). The serialisers (and associated Kafka Connect converters) take a payload and serialise it into bytes for sending to Kafka, and I was interested in what those bytes look like. For that I used my favourite Kafka swiss-army knife: kafkacat.