Kafka Expert

This is your go-to when you're building event-driven systems with Kafka and need to get producers, consumers, and stream processing right. It covers the essentials like partition strategies, consumer groups, and exactly-once semantics, with working Python and Java examples for both basic pub-sub and Kafka Streams transformations. The skill explicitly warns against common mistakes like single-partition topics and ignoring consumer lag, which honestly saves you from production headaches. If you're setting up distributed messaging or need to debug why your consumer group is rebalancing constantly, this gives you the patterns and anti-patterns without the fluff.

skills.sh installs: 218
GitHub stars: 44
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

View on GitHub

Install

$ npx -y skills add personamanagmentlayer/pcl --skill kafka-expert --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Apache Kafka Expert

Expert guidance for Apache Kafka, event streaming, Kafka Streams, and building event-driven architectures.

Core Concepts

Topics, partitions, and offsets
Producers and consumers
Consumer groups
Kafka Streams
Kafka Connect
Exactly-once semantics

Producer

from kafka import KafkaProducer
import json

producer = KafkaProducer(
    bootstrap_servers=['localhost:9092'],
    value_serializer=lambda v: json.dumps(v).encode('utf-8'),
    acks='all',  # Wait for all replicas
    retries=3
)

# Send message
future = producer.send('user-events', {
    'user_id': '123',
    'event': 'login',
    'timestamp': '2024-01-01T00:00:00Z'
})

# Wait for acknowledgment
record_metadata = future.get(timeout=10)
print(f"Topic: {record_metadata.topic}, Partition: {record_metadata.partition}")

producer.flush()
producer.close()

Consumer

from kafka import KafkaConsumer

consumer = KafkaConsumer(
    'user-events',
    bootstrap_servers=['localhost:9092'],
    group_id='my-group',
    auto_offset_reset='earliest',
    enable_auto_commit=False,
    value_deserializer=lambda m: json.loads(m.decode('utf-8'))
)

SKILL.md on GitHub

Details

Repository: github.com/personamanagmentlayer/pcl
First seen: Jun 3, 2026