Rion Williams

remote career productivity

Striking a Balance: Working Fully Remote for Nearly a Decade

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 loop, this

apache flink ai streaming

Exploring Squirrelly Apache Flink Performance Issues through Continual AI-Driven Evaluation

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 track

apache flink streaming open-source

Exploring Dynamic Sink Routing in Apache Flink via DemultiplexingSink

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 Unified

streaming ai community

Reflections on Current 2025: Streaming, AI, Beignets, and The Buffalo Bills?

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, incredible sessions,

apache flink ai streaming

Incremental Optimization in Apache Flink ... with AI

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 of

apache flink streaming kotlin

Dynamic Sink Routing in Apache Flink

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

personal

Dear Tech, I'm Still Here (Barely)

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 has been

kafka apache beam kotlin

A Distributed Tracing Adventure in Apache Beam

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&

kotlin apache beam learning

Avoiding Kotlin Minefields in Apache Beam

Without a doubt, the Java SDK is the most popular and full featured of the languages supported by Apache Beam [https://beam.apache.org/] and if you bring the power of Java's modern, open-source cousin Kotlin [https://kotlinlang.org/] into the fold, you'll find yourself with

kotlin apache beam learning

Introducing Apache Beam Katas for Kotlin

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

kafka learning streaming

An Education in Streaming

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 streaming data

productivity random community

No, You Aren't Alone.

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 I&

best-practices performance tools

When Containers Become Trashcans

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

c# asp.net visual-studio

Putting the Fun in C# Local Functions

Many popular languages support the use of local functions [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/classes-and-structs/local-functions] and in C# 7, support for them was announced with relatively little fanfare. As someone that would consider themselves a C# power-user, I seldom took advantage of the feature until I

kafka random career

The Other Kafka's Metamorphosis

As someone that has been crafting software for the better part of half of my life, it's be a long time since I've been as excited as I have been over the last few months. Since making the jump late last year into the world of

random best-practices productivity

How I Haven't Become an Amorphous Blob While Working Remotely

With it being February, I’m sure quite a few folks out there are still trying to keep their New Year's resolutions intact. Since I’d wager quite a few of those are in the area of fitness or personal wellness, this post falls in line with a

glyphfriend open-source community

Glyphfriend 2019 Released!

With a new year just beginning, it's always nice to start things out on the right foot and open-source is no exception. Several years ago, I developed a popular extension for Visual Studio called Glyphfriend [https://github.com/rionmonster/Glyphfriend]. It's a handy tool for developers

random debugging kafka

When Random Isn't the Right Random

Nearly any engineer worth his or her salt will likely agree that consistency is important. If they don’t, they probably haven’t ever worked on a large legacy application or with a team of any decent size. Everyone being roughly (sans tabs vs. spaces religious views) on the same

sql-server sql performance

Why is My SQL Server Query Slow?

As applications and their associated databases grow, things change. Rows get modified, schema get updated, and often, things can slow down. These performance hits may come up suddenly, or maybe intermittent, but it's important to know how to distinguish what is going on so that you can go

c# asp.net productivity

Happy New ... C# 9 Features!

As one of my languages du jour, I've always had a fondness for C#. It was one of the first high-level languages that I learned in college and it's been part of my daily professional life for the better part of ten years. One of the

best-practices random learning

Just Jump into the Stream

I've spent the better part of my ten-year career as a developer in a relatively safe bubble, technology-wise. Falling in love with a programming language or technology is a bit like the software version of having your first real girlfriend/boyfriend. They might change the ways that you

debugging random learning

The Bug That Got Away

One thing that I've always loved hearing about from fellow engineers or reading about on technical blogs are bugs. Nasty ones. Ones that keep you up at night and those that will wake you from a dead sleep. These are the ones that great stories are built upon,

c# transactions transactionscope

Slightly Rough Exchanges: Troubleshooting Transactional Issues with TransactionScope

In my previous post [http://rion.io/2019/04/20/smooth-transactions-with-transactionscope/], I discussed the use of TransactionScope within C# and how it might simplify how transactions are managed within your applications. It covered what transactions are, some of the ways that they are traditionally managed, and how the use of

c# asp.net dotnet

Smooth Transactions with TransactionScope

In the real world, we deal with transactions all the time, even though we rarely think of them as such. Things like driving to work or making dinner for the family require a series of things to all go as expected, otherwise bad things can happen. The sooner we recognize

visual studio productivity architecture

Visual Studio, Why Can't You Just Let Me Have This One (Solution Folder)?

If you've ever worked in a large code-base of around a hundred or so projects, then you know that organizing your code can almost be as important as writing the code itself. Organization is always subjective, sometimes multiple projects are enough, sometimes it can help to organize code