Add a blog post talking about kafkakitty

_posts/2019-12-07-kafkakitty.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Visualizing Kafka streams with Kafkakitty"
+tags:
+- kafka
+- kafkakitty
+- rust
+---
+
+People will sometimes look at my screen covered in terminal windows
+overflowing with text: "how do read all that?" These moments remind
+me how inscrutable backend development can appear to the outsider. Today I
+would like to introduce a tool that I hope makes a some parts a _little_ more
+easy to understand: [Kafkakitty](https://github.com/reiseburo/kafkakitty)
+
+
+Kafkakitty is a kafkacat-inspired utility which brings Kafka messages to your
+browser in real-time. Building on the concepts I explored with a project years
+ago titled 
+[Offtopic](https://github.com/reiseburo/offtopic), Kafkakitty is a tiny
+web application which you can run locally to provide a nice user interface to a
+set of Kafka streams.
+
+
+![Kafkakitty in action](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/reiseburo/kafkakitty/master/screenshot.png)
+
+
+
+
+At the end of practically every week, I have invited the Core Platform team to
+"find your square on the carpet for show-and-tell." The goal of show-and-tell
+is to share something you have learned this week, document a failed approach,
+or show something off. For a period of time, we had a _lot_ of exploratory work
+with [Apache Kafka](https://kafka.apache.org). Like most pieces of backend
+infrastructure, Apache Kafka does not "demo well." As one project continued
+across multiple weeks, demos often times would just be two terminals: one
+running our software, another running
+[kafkacat](https://github.com/edenhill/kafkacat). "Two terminals"
+became a running gag for the team. "Hold on a sec, let me get two terminals
+running.."
+
+
+Kafkakitty is a single binary like `kafkacat`, and similarly Kafkakitty can be
+run on your local machine and consume from a remote Kafka cluster. Unlike
+`kafkacat` however, Kafkakitty relies on your browser to provide a richer
+visualization of the messages arriving in the specified topics.
+Built in [Rust](https://rust-lang.org) and [Vue.js](https://vuejs.com), the
+project is in its early stages but works quite well for me against
+unauthenticated Kafka environments.
+
+I'm hoping it will prove useful for more people to understand Kafka and the
+events which backend systems are relaying through the system. Maybe it will
+even replace the "two terminals" demo sometime soon!

tag/firefox.md

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tag/kafkakitty.md

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