Mike Urbach

A real-time platform that consumes the world's signals, detects emergencies, and provides enriched context to decision-makers. I started as a junior software engineer on the platform team and grew into the roles of senior engineer, and project lead and platform architect. I worked with the platform team, other teams' leads, product managers, project managers, quality assurance, and executives to design, implement, and verify dozens of core systems that solved different business needs over the years.

In late 2016, I was dissatisfied with the currently available clients for connecting to a Kafka cluster with the Elixir programming language, and I created my own from scratch. I used it as an opportunity to learn both the Kafka protocol and how to build a moderately complex, high-performance Elixir application. To my knowledge, it was the first Elixir Kafka client to use a GenStage design until the official client from the core Elixir team was developed in 2019. This makes it seamlessly compatible with the Flow and Broadway libraries for Elixir in a way other clients are not.