I’m a big fan of Robin Moffatt’s writings and speaking content. I owe him a beer or two from all I have learned just from his prolific work on Kafka Connect. However, when I first encountered his article about configuring a sink to play a topic from the tail, rather than from the head, I didn’t understand why on earth anyone would want to do so. Well, now I do and let me share one possible scenario where this could save the day.

Recently, a random chain of events pushed me to develop a small degree of expertise with Snowflake Kafka Connect sink plugin. While this open-source project has some configuration documentation, and a README, it was not obvious to me how to initiate a build or get one of the tests up and running. After a bit of trial and error, I wrote down the step-by-step instructions below in case I need to do it again later.