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References: YouTube Video by Jordan Has No Life Kafka Summary Notes This article summarizes my personal understanding after watching the aforementioned video and reading the Kafka paper. I am still a student, so any inaccuracies or misunderstandings are unintentional—corrections are welcome. Kafka is a widely adopted distributed streaming platform. In this article, I will explore the key trade-offs Kafka makes in order to achieve its design goal of efficient log processing, and how these decisions contribute to Kafka’s architecture and performance. ...

The idea of building a personal site started back in September last year. I got a student-discounted instance from Alibaba Cloud (2 cores, 2GB RAM), and even went through the hassle of registering a domain name: changyi.fun. At first, I used WordPress. It worked — until it didn’t. I remember in one of my security classes, the professor specifically called out WordPress for being notoriously insecure. Around the same time, I tried to set up an SSL certificate (in the most complicated way possible via DNS challenge), and ended up completely breaking the site. I didn’t know back then that there were simpler ways. ...