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Event Bus Prototype
An in-memory event bus with pub/sub patterns, retry logic, and dead-letter queues. Built to understand message broker internals before adopting Kafka.
An in-memory event bus prototype built to understand message broker concepts before introducing Kafka into a production stack. Supports pub/sub patterns, consumer groups, retry with exponential backoff, and dead-letter queues.
A production application needed event-driven communication between services, but the team had no experience with message brokers. Rather than adopting Kafka blindly, I built a prototype to understand partitioning, consumer offsets, and failure handling patterns.
The prototype needed to demonstrate pub/sub patterns without the complexity of Kafka's log-based architecture. EventEmitter provided the core pattern, and Redis pub/sub demonstrated cross-process message delivery.
EventEmitter-based pub/sub with typed events.
Retry with exponential backoff, DLQ, and consumer acknowledgements.
Successfully demonstrated event-driven patterns to the team.
Informed the decision to adopt Kafka with confidence in the architectural patterns.
The prototype was valuable for learning but would not be production-ready. We adopted Kafka for the actual implementation, which was the right decision.
Building a simplified version of a complex system is an effective way to evaluate architectural decisions before committing to a production dependency.
Event-driven architecture requires careful consideration of failure modes that are not obvious until you implement them.