Hacker News, the only place in the world where you’re equally likely to encounter articles about Kafka, the brilliantly paranoid Bohemian writer, and Kafka, the data streaming platform.
I couldn’t tell which one this was until I opened it up.
I couldn’t tell which one this was until I opened it up.
> Jay Kreps chose to name the software after the author Franz Kafka because it is "a system optimized for writing", and he liked Kafka's work.
The nightmare has existed since the first ETL job was written, but by democratizing pub/sub access throughout companies, we can't help but be horrified by what we see going on in the dataplane. Apache Kafka, rather than creating this nightmare, brings light to it, just as Franz Kafka's literature brought light to the absurdity of life under evil bureaucracies.
Now he can't quite say this outright lest he offend some set of his customers who have to live in this reality, so we have that vague quote about "he's one of my favorite writers", but surely we can take a direct literary reference as a wink and a nod and read between the lines?
I think Kafka's point is that those bureaucracies are not evil, just uncaring. Which makes the end results even more sinister, as you get crushed through no clear malicious act.
[0]: https://www.confluent.io/blog/publishing-apache-kafka-new-yo...
“Isn’t it more surprising if something succeeds than if it fails?” — a parable for the whole business of software engineering.
That alone will tell you which one.