Exploring the world of streaming data platforms, the author shares their experience building a to-do application using Redpanda and gRPC, offering insights into selecting efficient tools for this purpose. Recognizing Apache Kafka's traditional dominance but noted complexity, the author opted for Redpanda, which provides a more user-friendly and scalable alternative with features like a developer-friendly CLI, GUI console, and cloud-native connectivity. Redpanda's compatibility with Kafka APIs, alongside its robust documentation and community support, made it a suitable choice. For API development, gRPC was chosen over REST due to its support for Protocol Buffers, offering efficient serialization, multi-language support, and native handling of uni-directional and bi-directional data flows with enhanced security and operational features. The process is demonstrated through a to-do app, leveraging Redpanda for topic management and gRPC for seamless API interactions, with the full demo available on GitHub. The guide emphasizes the benefits of Redpanda's simplified architecture and gRPC's high-performance capabilities for creating effective streaming data applications.