Sep 20, 2026 · 5 min read
The bottleneck was never the broker
A telemetry pipeline that kept falling over, a lock we should never have taken, and why more Kafka partitions were never the fix.
- architecture
- kafka
- event-driven
Software Architect · Principal Engineer · Engineering Leader
Software engineer and architect with 12+ years of experience designing and evolving distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, and high-scale backend architectures.

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Sep 20, 2026 · 5 min read
A telemetry pipeline that kept falling over, a lock we should never have taken, and why more Kafka partitions were never the fix.
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