What if you were given 2 weeks to prepare for running your first marathon, and had to be able to keep up with the fastest runner? This is the story of a small team that jumped head first into building a top tier stream processing (Apache Flink) service on a tight timeline, and how they prepared for being able to keep up with the fastest components. This talk will be of interest to those who want to build larger, more complex stream processing applications (and quickly), but will also benefit anyone who is looking to adopt a new streaming technology (or use it in a way that is new to their company), at any scale. Other takeaways include pragmatic steps to leverage unique Flink features to more effectively solve common, real world data streaming problems.