#Event Time

Articles about Event Time — exploring patterns, best practices, and real-world implementations in production systems.

2 posts tagged with event time. ← All posts

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Pratik Dhanave · ·7 min read

Watermarks — Reasoning About Time in an Out-of-Order Stream

Post 2 ended on a hard problem: you need event-time results, but events arrive late and out of order, so you never know when you've seen everything for a given time. Watermarks are stream processing's elegant answer — a running estimate of how far event time has progressed, letting you decide when it's safe to produce a result. They're the mechanism that makes correct event-time computation possible over a messy, unbounded stream.

Watermarks are stream processing's answer to late, out-of-order events: a running estimate of how far event time has progressed, letting you decide when it's safe to emit a result. How they make the completeness-vs-latency tradeoff explicit and tunable, and how to handle late events.

Pratik Dhanave · ·7 min read

Events, Streams, and Time — The Core Model

Stream processing has a small, elegant core model: everything is an event, events form streams, and time is a first-class concern. Getting these three ideas precise — especially the subtle and crucial distinction between when an event happened and when you process it — is what makes the rest of stream processing (windowing, state, correctness) comprehensible. This post builds the core vocabulary that everything else depends on.

The core model: events, streams, and time as first-class. The crucial, most-misunderstood distinction between event time (when it happened) and processing time (when you handle it), why correct answers depend on event time, and why that makes time the central problem of streaming.

All posts on this site are written by Pratik Dhanave, an Agentic AI Architect with 7+ years building production distributed systems, multi-agent AI platforms, and cloud-native infrastructure. About the author → Each article includes working code, architecture diagrams, and references to the specific frameworks and standards discussed. Browse all posts or explore related topics using the tag cloud above.