Interesting links - May 2026

Welcome to May’s Interesting Links ! This month saw the Current conference in London with the usual 5k run , lots of familiar faces and friendly conversations—and plenty of excellent breakout sessions too. It seems live-tweeting conferences isn’t a thing any more, with only myself and Thomas Cooper seeming to post anything, but if you want you can go review the hashtag feed on BlueSky for some highlights of the conference. I got my first Hacker News front page hit with AI Slop is Killing Online Communities (51k views and climbing!), and a nice little halo boost for another rant from earlier this year, AI will fsck you up if you’re not on board . Oh, and I got involved in some thought leadering over on LinkedIn ( which a non-zero number of people thought was serious ) with my shitposting about fried breakfasts . {{< il-header >}} Kafka and Event Streaming 🔥 Apache Kafka 4.3.0 has been released. Check out the release announcement , as well as a video from Sandon Jacobs covering the new features. 🔥 After a few quiet months on his blog, Jack Vanlightly is back with a bang! He’s written a new tool, Dimster, a performance benchmarking tool for Apache Kafka , and has written several more blog posts off the back of it: Benchmarking Apache Kafka Consumer Groups vs Share Groups (overhead test) . Kafka Share Groups and Parallelizing Consumption Part 1: Tuning max.poll.records , Part 2: Producer Batches and share.acquire.mode . 🔥 I had the absolute pleasure to watch Victor Rentea present at Devoxx UK earlier this month. This guy redefines what it means to be an entertaining, energetic, enthusiastic—and educational presenter. Whilst his specific talk, "Event-Driven Architecture Pitfalls" isn’t online yet, you can find the slides here , and a recording from Devoxx last year of a similar talk. The Parallel Consumer library from Confluent has been marked as no longer maintained, prompting a discussion of alternatives (and the concept itself) on LinkedIn, as well as a fork from one