Over a third of respondents to a StackOverflow survey professed to a dread of learning Apache Kafka. Nevertheless, with a curious mindset and the right resources, we have the tools to succeed in learning Kafka. Take the plunge with me; together, we will conquer concepts like events and topics, producers, and consumers. We'll gain confidence through learning about partitions and brokers and how to use Kafka in the cloud. We'll go over the different configurations for producers and consumers, and how these configurations affect application behavior. Then, accompany me on a code walkthrough and see how we build and run producers and consumers in Python with the kafka-python client. You'll be leaving with a spark of excitement, knowing you have neutralized your dread, and that you are now firmly within the two-thirds of StackOverflow respondents who are comfortable learning Apache Kafka.