Somewhere between being obsessed with Dungeon Crawler Carl and thinking about Apache Kafka, the lines got crossed and I ended up writing a blog post over the weekend.

It dives into Kafka Queues, one of Apache Kafka’s newer features, and looks at how they help bridge the coordination gap when chaos is flying everywhere whether that’s in production or a fantasy dungeon.

Using an adventuring dungeon party as an analogy, the post compares traditional consumer groups with the newer share group model and explore why coordination matters when you’re dealing with uneven workloads, bosses, traps, and everything in between. In distributed systems (and dungeons alike), failing to coordinate usually ends the same way: badly.

Overall — it's a pretty fun high-level summary of the underlying idea behind them and includes a "strategy guide" of blog posts and other articles that dive into those concepts a bit deeper.