At Smyte we're solving infrastructure-heavy problems with a tiny engineering team. We've had to build custom databases in order to efficiently solve problems, but don't have the luxury of a ton of development time. In this talk I'll go through how we used Kafka & Python to implement a prototype Sliding HyperLogLog server. It held up for the six months we needed to, and some early decisions made it trivial to port the server to our new efficient C++ & RocksDB stack.