It randomly decided going from no explicit partition key which would randomly add to a Kafka partition to partioning key company was the right solution.

In fact, that was fairly counterproductive since this codebase dumps events to the topic per company so you'd get a lumpy distribution where only one partition is ever active at once (starving other consumers)

The fact it decided it should add this without prompting was a bit shocking and I'll probably try to make it explicitly clear in the context not to "do random shit that wasn't asked for"

  Hardcoded constants everywhere
  Multiple same-line macro invocations in C
  Random indexes in production code
  Hideous tokenizer code in C