Look Ma, I made a JAR! (Building a connector for Kafka Connect without knowing Java)

As a non-Java coder, for the last ten years I’ve stumbled my way through the JVM-centric world of "big data" (as it was called then), relying on my wits with SQL and config files to just about muddle through. One of the things that drew me to Kafka Connect was that I could build integrations between Kafka and other systems without needing to write Java, and the same again for ksqlDB and Flink SQL—now stream processing was available to mere RDBMS mortals and not just the Java adonises. One ...