Here’s a bunch of interesting links and articles about data that I’ve come across recently.

I’m a HUGE fan of Docs as Code in general, and specifically tools like Vale that lint your prose for adherence to style rule.

One thing that had been bugging me though was how to selectively disable Vale for particular sections of a document. Usually linting issues should be addressed at root: either fix the prose, or update the style rule. Either it’s a rule, or it’s not, right?

Sometimes though I’ve found a need to make a particular exception to a rule, or simply needed to skip linting for a particular file. I was struggling with how to do this in Asciidoc. Despite the documentation showing how to, I could never get it to work reliably. Now I’ve taken some time to dig into it, I think I’ve finally understood :)

At Current 24 a few of us will be going for an early run (or walk) on Tuesday morning. Everyone is very welcome!

I do my best to try and keep, if not abreast of, then at least aware of what’s going on in the world of data. That includes RDBMS, Event streaming, stream processing, open source data projects, data engineering, object storage, and more. If you’re interested in the same, then you might find this blog useful, because I’m sharing my sources :)

Let’s not bury the lede: it was DNS. However, unlike the meme ("It’s not DNS, it’s never DNS. It was DNS"), I didn’t even have an inkling that DNS might be the problem.

I’m writing a new blog about streaming Apache Kafka data to Apache Iceberg and wanted to provision a local Kafka cluster to pull data from remotely. I got this working nicely just last year using ngrok to expose the broker to the interwebz, so figured I’d use this again. Simple, right?

Nope.

After a break from using AWS I had reason to reacquaint myself with it again today, and did so via the CLI. The AWS CLI is pretty intuitive and has a good helptext system, but one thing that kept frustrasting me was that after closing the help text, the screen cleared—so I couldn’t copy the syntax out to use in my command!

The same thing happened when I ran a command that returned output - the screen cleared.

Here’s how to fix either, or both, of these

At this year’s Kafka Summit I’m planning to continue the tradition of going for a run (or walk) with anyone who’d like to join in. This started back at Kafka Summit San Francisco in 2019 over the Golden Gate Bridge and has continued since then. Whilst London’s Docklands might not offer quite the same experience it’ll be fun nonetheless.

This year Kafka Summit London includes a dedicated track for talks about Apache Flink. This reflects the continued rise of interest and use of Apache Flink in the streaming community, as well as the focus that Confluent (the hosts of Kafka Summit) has on it.

I’m looking forward to being back at Kafka Summit. I will be speaking on Tuesday afternoon, room hosting on Wednesday morning, and hanging out at the Decodable booth in between too.

Here’s a list of all the Flink talks, including the talk, time, and speaker. You find find more details, and the full Kafka Summit agenda, here.

At Decodable we migrated our docs platform onto Antora. I wrote previously about my escapades in getting cross-repository authentication working using Private Access Tokens (PAT). These are fine for just a single user, but they’re tied to that user, which isn’t a good practice for deployment in this case.

In this article I’ll show how to use GitHub Apps and Installation Access Tokens (IAT) instead, and go into some detail on how we’ve deployed Antora. Our GitHub repositories are private which makes it extra-gnarly.

A friend messaged me late last night with the scary news that Google had emailed him about a ton of spammy subdomains on his own domain.

Any idea how this could have happened, he asked?