Stop Thinking in Request-Response: The Mental Model That Makes Kafka Click
Most developers hit a wall with Apache Kafka not because the technology is hard, but because they're trying to understand it using the wrong mental model.
If you've spent your career writing REST APIs, your instinct is to think in terms of calls and responses. Service A asks Service B for something. Service B answers. Done. It's clean, it's intuitive, and it breaks in interesting ways the moment your system grows beyond a handful of services.
The shift Kafka requires isn't technical. It's conceptual.
Events Are Not Requests
