My name is John Ward, I'm from Manchester in the UK and currently deliver supply chain solutions in the Cloud.

As part of these solutions, I use Apache Kafka extensively. I have been working with Rust for three years, and one year ago I became the maintainer for this repository. This library is important to me as it allows me to give something back to the Rust community.

Professionally I have worked in software development for over 20 years, and work on the subsystems of the first smartphones, as well as device drivers for graphics chips, and a tonne of mobile apps, including web browsers etc.

As well as Rust, I am working on supply chain microservices in Rust and Java, which have event streaming interfaces using Apache Kafka.

This sponsorship will allow me to work on it more and pay for cloud infrastructure for testing. Ideally, I would like to work on this library and integrating it into solutions full time.

I believe the Kafka Rust crate is important for Rust and will benefit a lot of platforms in the future.