Murphy's Law underscores the inevitability of failures in distributed systems, highlighting the importance of error handling in event-driven applications using Redpanda, a Kafka-compatible streaming data platform. This platform facilitates high throughput and low latency message exchange but leaves the responsibility of message processing and error handling to the consumer. To address message processing failures, developers can implement various error handling patterns, such as dead-letter topics (DLT) for unprocessable messages and different retry strategies for transient errors. Non-transient errors, or "poison pills," should be detected early and routed to a DLT to prevent resource wastage, while transient errors can be managed through non-blocking retries with fixed or exponential backoff intervals. These practices ensure reliability, traceability, and accountability in message processing, integrating seamlessly with Spring Kafka applications that benefit from built-in serialization/deserialization support and error handling features.