Rion Williams' blog on software engineering, technology, and more.
Recently, I’ve been borderline addicted to Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl series , which I cannot recommend enough. The books drop their characters into massive, chaotic dungeons filled with monsters, traps, loot, and a deeply unhinged AI that seems determined to keep things interesting . If you’
Sometimes, when we’re getting ready to launch a new Apache Flink job — or even just roll out a major new feature — we run into a familiar problem: we need meaningful data in state before the job can do what we built it to do. While enrichment
Recently, I was chatting with an engineer who was transitioning into a fully remote role for the first time in their career. They were excited, but also had a touch of anxiety about it. For someone who had spent their entire career in the familiar commute → office → commute
Last month, I wrote up a blog post discussing a three-phase cycle (profile, analyze, improve) for leveraging LLMs and other AI tooling to evaluate Apache Flink jobs for potential performance improvements. This post goes through what that process might look like in a more automated fashion to help you
Last year, I wrote a blog post discussing ideas on how to support use-cases in Apache Flink that required dynamically resolving (and potentially creating) sinks at runtime based on the incoming data. While this solution was fairly practical, it was written against older APIs as opposed leveraging the new
As the mental (and possibly physical) hangover begins to wear off, I figured I’d take a moment to reflect on my recent trip to Confluent’s 2025 Current conference , conveniently held right here in my home state of Louisiana. It was a week filled with brilliant people,
While performance always matters, streaming pipelines are where it can matter a lot . Concepts like Big O notation that you may have repressed from your days learning computer science can come back to bite you if neglected (I’m looking at you, quadruply nested loops). Often, the most minimal
Apache Flink makes it incredibly seamless to take your streaming data and throw it exactly where you want it to go. It supports tons of different sources and sinks out of the box to easily plug and play to your ETL'ing hearts desire. But what happens when you
This blog and in general most of my public presence on the internet has been pretty quiet over the better part of the last year or more. It’s hasn’t been for the lack of desire to do so, but rather the literal storm that my life
Distributed systems are hard, and things can often get much more difficult when problems arise. This is only exacerbated by the fact that many of these systems can be notoriously difficult to dig into when they are actually out in the wild and not just running "on your machine&
Without a doubt, the Java SDK is the most popular and full featured of the languages supported by Apache Beam and if you bring the power of Java's modern, open-source cousin Kotlin into the fold, you'll find yourself with a wonderful developer experience. As with
Everyone learns differently, especially when it comes to technology. Some folks enjoy reading a book, others like immediately diving in and getting their hands dirty. Being inspired by the folks in the latter half of that statement, I decided to follow the lead of a few other folks that had
I’m probably one of the few folks out there that love a good technical book. Sure, well written blog posts, tutorials, and exploratory projects are amazing, but if you really want to dig deep, books can be a great resource. Since I’ve fallen in love with
This situation sucks. My heart goes out to all of those affected by this terrible pandemic across the globe. With our lives flipped upside-down for the foreseeable future, I thought I'd shed some insight into what's going on in my neck of the woods, how
Containers are so awesome. Prior to containers, if you wanted to experiment with some new technology, you had to go through the ringer to configure and install all of the appropriate dependencies, set up the proper infrastructure, and clutter your machine with tons of trash that you might not ever