Streaming Systems

Preface Or: What Are You Getting Yourself Into Here?

Hello adventurous reader, welcome to our book! At this point, I assume that you’re either interested in learning more about the wonders of stream processing or hoping to spend a few hours reading about the glory of the majestic brown trout. Either way, I salute you! That said, those of you in the latter bucket who don’t also have an advanced understanding of computer science should consider how prepared you are to deal with disappointment before forging ahead; caveat piscator, and all that.

To set the tone for this book from the get go, I wanted to give you a heads up about a couple of things. First, this book is a little strange in that we have multiple authors, but we’re not pretending that we somehow all speak and write in the same voice like we’re weird identical triplets who happened to be born to different sets of parents. Because as interesting as that sounds, the end result would actually be less enjoyable to read. Instead, we’ve opted to each write in our own voices, and we’ve granted the book just enough self-awareness to be able to make reference to each of us where appropriate, but not so much self-awareness that it resents us for making it only into a book and not something cooler like a robot dinosaur with a Scottish accent.¹

As far as voices go, there are three you’ll come across:

Tyler

That would be me. If you haven’t explicitly been told someone else is speaking, you can assume that it’s me, because we added ...