“Stream processing” is a term that you might hear a lot, but what exactly does it mean? How would you explain it to a newcomer? And what are its key properties? Time for a quick lesson. 1/ There are lots of different kinds of computer programming out there, and there are a myriad of ways to bucket them into different groups. One interesting way to do that is to think about how a programming model handles its inputs and outputs.

1/ People often wonder how tumbling (sometimes called “fixed”) windows work in stream processing. They’re an incredibly useful construct, and their implementation can be surprisingly interesting. Let’s dig in! There are lots of problems where a piece of data is only relevant to other pieces of data that occur close to it in terms of time. In other words, you need to group proximal events together based on when they happened. Windows are an abstraction for doing just that.