Day 0 - The Commitment to Kafka

Kickoff to learning Apache Kafka. Outlining goals, daily actions, and first notes from the book.
Author

Shashank Hosahalli Shivamurthy

Published

July 6, 2025

DAY 0

Starting today, I am making another commitment to learn Apache Kafka in depth.

The idea is to:

  • Learn about Kafka deeply
  • Ask questions along the way
  • Learn consistently
  • Post on Twitter, maybe?
  • Write blog entries
  • Progress little by little, every day

The goal is to:

  • Familiarize myself with the internals of Kafka
  • Understand distributed systems in depth
  • Eventually contribute to the Apache Kafka open source repository

What are the actions to do every day?

  • Read Kafka: The Definitive Guide
  • Watch videos or tutorials if needed
  • Post learnings on Twitter
  • Document daily notes in my personal blog

Day 0 Notes

Started reading Kafka: The Definitive Guide

  • Kafka is all about Data in Motion
  • Kafka began as a commit log
  • Most popular use cases for Kafka:
    • Message buses for event-driven microservices
    • Stream processing applications
    • Large-scale data pipelines

One of the problems in software engineering is that there is always more than one way to do anything.
— Kafka: The Definitive Guide

That’s all for today.

Tomorrow, I will begin with:

Chapter 1. Meet Kafka