The Confluent repository experienced an incident that caused the accumulated star count to reset. At its peak in August 2023, the repository had 548 stars (verified via the Wayback Machine snapshot). Earlier in 2023 it had 479 stars, and by 2024 it had dropped to 123 after the incident. It has since been recovering and currently sits at its present count.
Antony Stubbs
Software engineer. Easily intrigued.
Updates
Announcing Duplicate Code Cross-Check
16 April 2026A new GitHub Action that detects duplicate code on pull requests using two engines and posts a base-vs-PR comparison comment. Built because agentic coding makes duplication accumulate fast.
Picking Parallel Consumer up again
13 April 2026The Parallel Consumer library is getting a new active home. I built this project during my time at Confluent, and after a period where the original repository went quiet, I'm re-establishing it as a properly-maintained community open source project on my fork.
Commercial
Veil
"See only what you've seen." A progress-gated media companion that tracks characters, places, and plot threads in serialized media without spoilers. Designed as an accessibility tool for ADHD, aging readers, and second-language viewers.
BiteWise
AI-powered nutrition tracking iOS app. Log meals via text, photo, or voice -- get calorie and macro estimates with food recognition powered by OpenAI. Track progress toward health goals with AI coaching.
MenuMe
Lightweight variant of BiteWise focused on restaurant menu recognition and ordering. Quick nutrition analysis for dining out.
Tactile Infrasonic Systems Research
ReelDesc
Semantic descriptions for video and playback. An open-source pipeline that generates dense semantic understanding of any visual media -- offline, locally, on consumer hardware. From that understanding, multiple output formats are derived: elemental effects tracks (.3fx), accessibility descriptions, visual description subtitles, and semantic search indexes. One generation pass, many consumers.
ezElementals
ActivePlayback module -- LLM-powered effects engine that analyzes video and syncs wind, water, and heat effects to movie playback in real time.
Alloy AV
Mobile companion app and controller for ezBEQ, ReelDesc, and ezElementals. Provides onboarding wizards and volume/device controls. Cross-platform iOS/Android.
Hardware Development
Subwoofer Arrays & HEZe Platforms
Custom 18" camouflaged subwoofer arrays in 2 and 2x2 configurations, plus custom HEZe vibration platforms.
Elemental 4D FX Hardware
At-home 4D effects hardware for wind, water, fire, and more. Controlled by ezElementals using source material generated by ReelDesc.
Contributing
BEQ Designer
Visual tool for designing bass equalization filters for home theater audio.
My fork:
Upstream repository
ezBEQ
Web browser for BEQ audio filters with local remote control of MiniDSP and HTP-1 audio processors.
My fork:
Upstream repository
Open Source Projects (Author)
Parallel Apache Kafka consumer that processes multiple messages concurrently from a single consumer instance. Higher throughput and lower latency than traditional partition-based parallelism.
Kafka Summit Europe 2021 presentation
The project's active home -- carrying it forward as a fully open source effort with renewed commitment to community maintenance:
Original location at Confluent previously 548 stars
What happened to the stars?
Truth Generator
Maven plugin that generates assertion boilerplate for Google's Truth testing framework. Fluent chained assertions without writing Subjects by hand.
Audiobook Tools
CLI tools for converting and processing audiobooks -- merging FLAC files, handling CUE sheets, converting to M4B/AAC with chapter markers and metadata.
IPv6 Route Listener
Listens for IPv6 Router Advertisements and automatically configures ULA prefixes and routes. Solves Thread Border Router support issues on systems like Synology DSM.
Duplicate Code Cross-Check
Detect duplicate code using PMD CPD + jscpd with base-vs-PR comparison. Posts a combined PR comment showing newly duplicated code introduced by the change, not just the full duplication set.
Tributary: Kafka Streams
Reference implementation of real-world Kafka Streams application patterns for data pipelines.
Elsewhere
Presentations
Videos
Introducing Confluent Labs Parallel Consumer Client -- conference presentation on the Parallel Consumer library.
Archive
Early exploration of the Scala programming language on the JVM.
Writeup of implementing Portlet 2.0 event support for Apache Wicket.
New Zealand's Java Platform podcast -- ongoing discussions about Java/JVM and the development space with an Auckland and NZ focus.
Stack Overflow
Notable answers:
How do I revert all local changes in Git? +513 · 3.2M views
How to get the last value of an ArrayList +261 · 1.2M views
Ignore files already committed to Git +93 · 1M views
Using Maven for multiple deployment environments +76
Scala parenthesis/dots/braces omission rules +47
How to get the last value of an ArrayList +261 · 1.2M views
Ignore files already committed to Git +93 · 1M views
Using Maven for multiple deployment environments +76
Scala parenthesis/dots/braces omission rules +47
Notable OSS Contributions (Archive)
Widely-referenced script for finding and trimming large objects in Git repositories. Became a community resource for cleaning up repo history.
Led the fork and revival of the abandoned Spring Modules project, producing the first release in over a year. Extended the Spring Framework with caching, validation, and other add-ons.
Implemented Portlet 2.0 / JSR-286 event support for Apache Wicket, enabling the framework to work in portal environments like Liferay.
Git cvsimport Plumbing Migration
PatchContributed to Git's internal plumbing commands, migrating CVS import functionality to use modern Git internals.
Early Open Source Contributions
Apache Wicket 2 patches
WICKET-1620 Portlet 2.0 support
WICKET-2058 Upgrade Portlet support to native Portlet API 2.0
Hibernate 1 patch
HHH-3403 ResultSetTransformer to convert two columns into HashMap
Other
GRADLE-154 Groovy converter from Maven to Gradle dependencies
PLUTO-517 PortletWindowConfig generates troublesome id with leading slash
PB-84 ClassCastException in PortletWindowUtils.getPortletWindowId
WSGMAPP-7 WicketStuff Google Maps patch
WebSphere PK45107 Servlet filter exception not propagated to client
Recommended
Linus Torvalds presents Git at Google. A formative talk for me -- I was an early Git proponent, and this video captures exactly why distributed version control matters.
Author of The Pragmatic Programmer. Brilliant and motivating pro-Rails talk at Railsconf 2006, hitting back at FUD. (Historical -- Google Video link may be unavailable.)
Admin
Logo exploration page with all concepts and colour variants.