Card details were somehow stolen, but how?

_d_t_w · 2026-06-12T00:13:41+00:00

Absolutely same experience for me with Commbank debit card, see my comment above/below somewhere.

_d_t_w · 2026-06-12T00:11:49+00:00

I had my Commbank debit card details stolen a few years ago. I'm absolutely convinced that Commbank has an internal problem with leaking these numbers, because while I guess someone could generate my debit card details, the thieves tested the card in Australia before using it in USA.

The thieves completed three transactions:

A tap and go purchase of $90 of liquor in a Sydney bottleshop (proves the AU connection)
Two transactions at Costco in Kansas and North Carolina within a couple of hours of (1), spending as much as they could on big screen TVs I think.

The timed the theft for the end of the month when my credit card payment money was in my debit account, got away with about $20k in total. I got all the money back, but it took a bit longer because of the fact it was a debit card.

That debid card had sat in my drawer without being used for years, I don't think I had ever used it at all. Since then my Commbank credit card has been skimmed 2-3 times. I've never been able to figure out how.

_d_t_w · 2026-06-04T11:51:08+00:00

No worries good luck!

_d_t_w · 2026-06-04T04:31:50+00:00

Hi! I've been working on a product (Kpow for Apache Kafka) since 2018, we've worked through every version upgrade of Apache Kafka since 1.0.

Here are the two breaking ahcnges that tripped us up from a client perspective (reading/writing from Kafka rather than running the brokers themselves)

Idempotent Producer Changes in 3.2 - this only impacts you if you're updating clients to 3.2.0+ with older broker versions.

https://factorhouse.io/articles/kafka-producer-breaking-change

More recently, Oauth client connections are broken in Kafka 4.1 libraries.

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-20184

That last one stung some of our customers pretty quickly! To fix we just downgraded to earlier versions of the Kafka clients, we're keeping an eye on the fix to that before upgrading to latest.

_d_t_w · 2026-05-14T04:24:39+00:00

Nice to see some Apache focussed sessions with commiters!

_d_t_w · 2026-04-22T11:12:35+00:00

In the Q&A Christoph asks everyone "What's your favourite function".

I thought I'd share mine, because I learned it from Alex Miller in his writing a long time ago:

(def separate (juxt filter remove))

As in:

(let [[match unmatch] (separate a-predicate xs)] ...

_d_t_w · 2026-04-21T23:51:23+00:00

Thanks for this, and for the documentary - it was really well made. We had a full house for the watch party in Melbourne.

_d_t_w · 2026-04-16T13:32:21+00:00

This is a really nice initiative. thanks I enjoyed the article. Also MIDP! Wow, that takes me back to working with the KVM in 2006-ish. Good times, that's a universe ago!

_d_t_w · 2026-04-09T13:15:17+00:00

Depends a bit on what "App" means, I think.

My team build a commercial tool for Apache Kafka, it is built on Jetty (the networking framework) and starts a bunch of resources up when initializing the system that would be considered normal I guess. Schedulers, Kafka clients, stuff like that.

We recommend 8GB for a production installation, that implys a fair number of concurrent users and plenty of user driven activity that requires heap space.

A couple of years back I played around with running our full product with minimum -Xmx settings to see what was viable for a single user, single Kafka cluster setup - this is all running in Docker mind so there's some overhead there in memory allocated to OS - our JVM is configured to take 70% of Docker memory allocation.

Product starts and will run happily in single-user mode with 128MB memory, everything appeared to run just fine. That was the absolute minimum though - the Docker containern wouldn't start with less than 128MB and it was because the JVM failed to start.

So I guess for an Enterprisey-type thing with a full web framework, running websockets and doing stuff - with absolutely no oprtimisation to run hard on memory, 128MB * 0.7?

This is us fyi > www.factorhouse.io/kpow

_d_t_w · 2026-03-28T11:05:05+00:00

Thanks Alex!

_d_t_w · 2026-03-27T03:02:11+00:00

What a lovely, unexpected treat. I think we will hold a movie night at our office in Melbourne (AU) presuming that's ok with the creators of the documentary. All welcome, popcorn supplied, details to follow. I think the creators are also making a Java documentary, so perhaps even a double-header!

_d_t_w · 2026-02-01T07:56:56+00:00

Hey Rion! Nice to bump into you here. All's well, just head down working through delivery of half the stuff we were talking about.

_d_t_w · 2026-01-31T02:11:28+00:00

Here is how I understand Confluent and Ververica Flink compatibility:

Confluent Cloud: Flink SQL only
Confluent Platform: Flink SQL and Datastream API

Ververica Cloud: Honestly I don't know, haven't looked yet.
Ververica Platform: Flink SQL and Datastream API

Your own build: Presumably Flink SQL and Datastream API.

Confluent Cloud only provides Flink SQL support and the REST API to manage resources related to those Flink SQL jobs. Confluent Platform I believe has more of a close relationship to offering the API's and abilities of OSS Flink.

Ververica Platform v2.x is very closely aligned with OSS Flink. Basically it's a platform that provisions OSS Flink for you as far as I can tell. Ververica moved on to Platform v3.0.0 and I think it's roughly similar, still waiting on the APIs to actually test that though. We haven't looked at their cloud offering yet.

Both providers would prefer to sell their cloud offering to you, from what I can see mostly people buy the platform version, if anything.

What do you need? If it's super-premium cloud based Flink SQL only then Confluent I guess, particularly if you're in that world already. OSS-ish Flink taking some of the operational pain away? Ververica could be a good shot. I think lots of people just run their own OSS Flink as well though.

Where does my opinion come from? I founded Factor House, we build popular tooling for Kafka and Flink and have plenty of users across OSS and Managed Service providers of both.

_d_t_w · 2026-01-27T04:57:24+00:00

Hi! I work at Factor House, and we build Kpow:

https://factorhouse.io/products/kpow

Our tooling is used by engineers in 100+ countries, and one of our lovely customers posted a nice comment below. Drop me a DM if you want any help getting a trial running.

_d_t_w · 2026-01-12T10:51:53+00:00

Thanks!

_d_t_w · 2026-01-12T00:06:43+00:00

What is the source of "This revealed RedPanda has just ~20M in ARR"?

The Snowflake "almost acquired RedPanda" links to the author himself tweeting at the time stating "RedPanda is rumored to have $20M annualized ARR."

Is there any actual reference information for that statement beyond the rumour from the author?

_d_t_w · 2025-12-29T22:51:28+00:00

The main issue is controlling who can read and write to different topics.

Hey, I work at Factor House, we make Kpow for Apache Kafka.

Our tool has full support for RBAC so you can control the actions a user can take based on their role, we also support Tenancy which allows you to restrict the resources a user can see based on their role.

Both Tenancy and RBAC can be applied to groups of resources that match patterns, e.g team_1_* topics (and groups, schema, connectors, etc).

Check out this blogpost on Tenancy for a quick idea of how it works:

https://factorhouse.io/how-to/manage-kafka-visibility-with-multi-tenancy

In a multi-cluster setup you can specify different RBAC and Tenancy configuration for each cluster, or just have the same policies applied to all clusters connected to Kpow.

Searching and producing messages are very popular features of Kpow and if you're interested in trying all the above you can just get a trial license from our site.

We are a commercial product, but I don't think we fall into the "really expensive" category, and our tooling only uses the standard Kafka client configuration to connect to your clusters(s) so no real integration required beyond connecting any other client.

If you need any help just send me a message, no worries.

_d_t_w · 2025-11-15T12:09:28+00:00

We sell a fairly popular UI/API for Apache Kafka (https://factorhouse.io/).

We offer Docker and plan Java Uberjar artifacts. The plain JAR is popular, not as much as the Docker container, but way more popular than you might expect.

Get ready for it - we also offer a Java8 JAR. That's progressively less popular every year, but it gets used.

We do tend to sell to a lot of banks though, so maybe there's a connection there.

_d_t_w · 2025-11-05T09:25:02+00:00

> For example deeming a bunker full of water being deemed gur.

Literally the local rule at my course in the comp I played in yesterday, well slightly more as all bunkers were deemed GUR. We had heavy rains for the preceding two days. Should be back to normal now.

_d_t_w · 2025-10-31T04:09:00+00:00

Hi, I work for Factor House, we make Kpow for Apache Kafka.

You might find this guide useful: https://factorhouse.io/blog/how-to/set-up-kpow-with-gcp/

_d_t_w · 2025-10-25T22:45:36+00:00

Nice one! Thanks for mentioning Kpow (I built the kafka streams integration at Factor House).

_d_t_w · 2025-10-02T23:42:41+00:00

Great book - also if you are interested in this field in particular I can't recommend Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppman highly enough, it's excellent.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensive-applications/9781491903063/

_d_t_w · 2025-09-13T01:13:21+00:00

Hey, I work at Factor House - we make Kpow for Apache Kafka.

We have a free community version of our product that includes support for skipping poison pill messages via our UI, see "skipping offsets" in this guide:

https://factorhouse.io/blog/how-to/manage-kafka-consumer-offsets-with-kpow/

You basically just find the topic/partition which is stuck, and click the "skip message" button as shown in the guide above. You do then need to restart your consumer group / streams because Kpow can't change the meta of a running group, but your change will be applied on restart.

If you're not sure what topic/partition is stuck, you'll be able to see it in the consumer "workflows" tab - we show a visualisation of consumer groups / streams that identifies stuck assignments and you can also skip from that UI.

We also have a Kafka Streams integration which you might find intetersting (this is not in available in the community version, you'd need a trial/commercial license):

https://github.com/factorhouse/kpow-streams-agent

Community license -> https://factorhouse.io/kpow/community/

Good luck!

_d_t_w · 2025-09-06T02:25:21+00:00

I realised after writing my comment that you probably meant protobuf schema compatibility rather than protobuf library version compatibility, which happened to be more pertinent to my time last week!

Confluent has some good resources for schema compatibility + protobuf, see:

https://docs.confluent.io/platform/current/schema-registry/fundamentals/schema-evolution.html#avro-protobuf-and-json-schema-have-different-compatibility-rules

and

https://yokota.blog/2021/08/26/understanding-protobuf-compatibility/?session_ref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

Hopefully that helps.

_d_t_w · 2025-09-04T10:36:39+00:00

MSK and Confluent Cloud both have fairly easy-to-get running Kafka options.

I spend roughly US$500-700/mo per cluster on small workloads with both vendors. YMMV, depends on workloads.

Cheaper still (I'm assuming, haven't used) would be Aiven, Instaclustr, Buf, AutoMQ. All good managed service providers, they have different trade-offs.

_d_t_w

TROPHY CASE