Joel Hanson
Software engineer with 8+ years on backend and distributed systems.
At IBM Event Streams I work on Kafka Connect, schema registry migrations,
and Kubernetes operators: delivery guarantees, reconnects, and the failure
modes that show up after deploy.
Open to global and remote roles.
Selected Work
Apicurio Registry
V2→V3 · zero downtime · Event Streams v12.1 critical path
Schema registry migration and upstream MCP work for IBM Event Streams.
ContextLayer
Open-source MCP bridge · REST → tools in minutes
Transform any REST API into an MCP server — connectors that make existing APIs usable by LLM tools.
Kafka MCP Server
Kafka ops as LLM tools · topics, consumers, produce
Expose Kafka cluster operations as LLM-accessible tools via the Model Context Protocol.
Kafka Common Problems
Production playbooks · symptoms → diagnosis → fix
Operational playbooks for common Kafka production issues — symptoms, diagnosis steps, and fixes you can walk with a customer.
Recent Writing
- When One Kafka Partition Takes All the Heat [4 min] How to diagnose and fix Kafka hot partitions: per-partition lag checks, key design, salting or isolation for huge keys, and a Docker Compose demo to recreate the skew.
- Wayfare: I Plan Trips More Than I Take Them [6 min] How I built Wayfare, a travel bucket list and savings tracker with MCP and OAuth, so ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor share the same trip context.
- The Connector That Kept Retrying and Never Said So [3 min] Why Kafka Connect errors.retry.timeout does not cover connector put() retries, and how mq.retry.timeout.ms on the IBM MQ Sink turns endless RetriableException loops into real task …
- From Prompt to Home Screen: Shipping Nursing Tracker with GitHub Pages [6 min] How a one-tap nursing timer for my wife grew into a shared feeding log, and how to ship a small AI-assisted web app for free with GitHub Pages.
- Aesthetic Habit Tracker: A Challenge Grid That Lives in Your Browser [4 min] A clean, challenge-based habit tracker with local storage, printable exports, and free GitHub Pages hosting.
Series
Kafka Common Problems
Operational playbooks for Kafka issues that show up in production — symptoms, diagnosis, and fixes.
Kafka Connect
From a KRaft cluster to custom connectors, tombstones, tests, and streaming into Kafka.
MCP
Expose Kafka, Django APIs, REST APIs, and travel context as tools for AI assistants via the Model Context Protocol.
Side Projects
Markdown2Medium
Convert Hugo-friendly Markdown into Medium-ready posts with a live preview and one-click copy.
Wayfare
Travel bucket list and savings tracker with MCP. Same trip context in ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor.
Antarctic Iceberg Tracker
Real-time iceberg monitoring with NASA data, automated pipelines, and GitHub as a data platform.