Why should the Java folk have all the fun?!

My friend and colleague Gunnar Morling launched a fun challenge this week: how fast can you aggregate and summarise a billion rows of data? Cunningly named The One Billion Row Challenge (1BRC for short), it’s aimed at Java coders to look at new features in the language and optimisation techniques.

Not being a Java coder myself, and seeing how the challenge has already unofficially spread to other communities including Rust and Python I thought I’d join in the fun using what I know best: SQL.

Antora is a modern documentation site generator with many nice features including sourcing documentation content from one or more separate git repositories. This means that your docs can be kept under source control (yay 🎉) and in sync with the code of the product that they are documenting (double yay 🎉🎉).

As you would expect for a documentation tool, the Antora documentation is thorough but there was one sharp edge involving GitHub that caught me out which I’ll detail here.

AI, what a load of hyped-up bollocks, right? Yet here I am, legit writing a blog about it and not for the clickbait but…gasp…because it’s actually useful.

Used correctly, it’s just like any other tool on your desktop. It helps you get stuff done quicker, better—or both.

I’ve used Hugo for my blog for several years now, and it’s great. One of the things I love about it is the fast build time coupled with it’s live-reload feature. Using this I can edit my source (Markdown or Asciidoc) in one window, hit save, and see the preview update in my browser window next to it pretty much instantaneously. For copy-editing, experimenting with images, etc this is really helpful.

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). At the moment I’m pretty much in full-time lurker mode, soaking up the kind of questions that people have and how they’re using Flink.

One question that caught my eye was from Marco Villalobos, in which he asked about the Flink JDBC driver and a SQLDataException he was getting with a particular datatype. Now, unfortunately, I have no idea about the answer to this question—but the idea of a JDBC driver through which Flink SQL could be run sounded like a fascinating path to follow after previously looking at the SQL Client.

Sometimes you might want to access Apache Kafka that’s running on your local machine from another device not on the same network. I’m not sure I can think of a production use-case, but there are a dozen examples for sandbox, demo, and playground environments.

In this post we’ll see how you can use ngrok to, in their words, Put localhost on the internet. And specifically, your local Kafka broker on the internet.

When I started my journey learning Apache Flink one of the things that several people expressed an interest in hearing more about was PyFlink. This appeals to me too, because whilst Java is just something I don’t know and feels beyond me to try and learn, Python is something that I know enough of to at least hack my way around it. I’ve previously had fun with PySpark, and whilst Flink SQL will probably be one of my main focusses, I also want to get a feel for PyFlink.

The first step to using PyFlink is installing it - which should be simple, right?

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. Being an absolutely abysmal coder—but knowing a thing or two about SQL—I figure that Flink SQL is where my focus is going to lie (I’m also intrigued by PyFlink, but that’s for another day…).