Confluent Developer ft. Tim Berglund, Adi Polak & Viktor Gamov

Tim Berglund talks to Andrew Schofield (Confluent) about his career in Apache Kafka. Andrew’s first job: working on queuing systems in 1991. His challenge: working at Confluent and in the Kafka community to bring queue semantics into Kafka while also helping shape major efforts like diskless Kafka, disaster recovery, and the project’s broader evolution. ► Queues for Kafka Explained (KIP-932): http...

Tim Berglund talks to John Miller (Enid Technologies) and Eric Broda (Agentic Mesh Company) about their work on agent mesh and enterprise agents. Their challenge: rethinking agents as enterprise-grade participants in business processes. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed Music by Coastal Kites   Artwork...

Tim Berglund talks to Matthias J. Sax (Confluent) about 10 whole years of Kafka Streams! Matthias’ first job: electrician-in-training on BMW’s assembly lines. His challenge: reflecting on 10 years of Kafka Streams growth, major milestones, and what comes next. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed Music by...

Tim Berglund talks to Gunnar Morling (Confluent) about his career in open source Java and data infrastructure. Gunnar’s first job: a student PHP developer in AMD’s e-learning group. His challenge: building Hardwood, a fast, multi-threaded Parquet engine for Java with minimal dependencies. ► The One Billion Row Challenge blog post: https://www.morling.dev/blog/one-billion-row-challenge/ SEASON 2 Ho...

Adi Polak talks to Russell Spitzer (Snowflake) about his career in open source data infrastructure. Russell’s first job: software engineer in test at DataStax. His challenge: making Apache Iceberg ready for AI and streaming. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed Music by Coastal Kites   Artwork by Phil Vo ...

Tim Berglund talks to Caleb Grillo (Confluent / WarpStream) about his career in data streaming product management. Caleb’s first job: washing windows. Their challenge: reshaping Confluent Cloud’s billing and pioneering diskless Kafka to trade latency for huge cost savings. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Moh...

Adi Polak talks to Mateo Rojas (LittleHorse) about his career working with Kafka Streams. Mateo’s first job: building a real-money policy management platform on early Kafka Streams. His challenge: working at LittleHorse with Kafka as a workflow engine and deciding whether it should be the source of truth. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gal...

Tim Berglund talks to Joseph Marais (Confluent) about his career in data streaming. Joseph’s first job: SAN administrator. His challenge: AI radically changing how developers build software. The Pragmatic Engineer episode ft. Grady Booch: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/software-architecture-with-grady-booch SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited...

Tim Berglund talks to Will LaForest (Confluent) about his career in software and data streaming. Will’s first job: a high school internship at DARPA. His challenge: turning advanced technology into something people actually care about. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed Music by Coastal Kites   Artwork...

Viktor Gamov talks to Baruch Sudakurski (TuxCare) about his career in developer advocacy. Baruch's first job: fixing electric kettles. His challenge: figuring out how to map a non-relational database (MongoDB) into Spring Data’s SQL-oriented model. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed Music by Coasta...

Adi Polak talks to Aravind Suresh (OpenAI) about his career in distributed systems and real-time streaming. Arvind’s first job: coding at school. His challenge: turning OpenAI’s fragile Kafka setup into a reliable, multi-region streaming backbone. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed Music by Coastal Kite...

Tim Berglund talks to Gunnar Morling (Confluent) about his career in open source Java and data streaming. Gunnar’s first job: a student PHP developer in AMD’s e-learning group. His challenge: working at Decodable on the 1 Billion Row Challenge. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed Music by Coastal Kites  ...

Adi Polak talks to Sage Pierce (Indeed) about his career in software engineering and event-driven architectures. Sage’s first job: Java Swing development at a Department of Defense–affiliated research lab. His challenge: working at Indeed on event-driven views and IMI to join data across domains in a polyglot microservices world. Sage's Atleon project: https://github.com/atleon  SEASON 2 Host...

Viktor Gamov talks to Leonid Igolnik (Former CTO at Clari) about his career in B2B SaaS engineering leadership. Leonid’s first job: teaching kids Pascal. His challenge: changing buyer behavior and scale complex systems. Books mentioned: ► Influence without Authority: https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Without-Authority-Allan-Cohen/dp/0471463302 ► Drive: https://www.danpink.com/books/drive/ ► Blink:...

Tim Berglund talks to Colt McNealy (LittleHorse Enterprises) about his career in distributed systems. Colt’s first job: software engineer at a real estate company. His challenge: working in a complex microservices environment and turning that pain into Little Horse. Colt's Current 2024 talk: https://current.confluent.io/2024-sessions/kafka-streams-as-a-data-store-for-a-workflow-engine Gunnar...

Adi Polak talks to Daniel Doubrovkine (Shopify) about his career building data‑intensive systems. Daniel’s first job: delivering pharmacy medications by bike. His challenge: building Artsy’s Art Genome and auctions as simple as possible. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed Music by Coastal Kites   Artwor...

Viktor Gamov talks to Jeremy Custenborder (Confluent) about his career in large-scale systems. Jeremy’s first job: paper boy. His challenge: keeping MySpace running at a massive pre-cloud scale while building the tools that didn’t exist yet and learning to fail fast. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed M...

Tim Berglund talks to Richie Artoul (WarpStream/Confluent) about his career in data infrastructure. Richie’s first job: working at Howie’s Game Shack, a walk‑in LAN gaming cafe. His challenge: working at Datadog on a new log storage system. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed Music by Coastal Kites   Art...

Adi Polak talks to Bryan Oliver (Thoughtworks) about his career in platform engineering and large-scale AI infrastructure. Bryan’s first job: building pools and teaching swimming lessons. His challenge: running large-scale GPU data centers while keeping AI workloads predictable and reliable. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter...

Tim Berglund talks to Sophie Blee-Goldman (Responsive) about her career in container orchestration and Kafka Streams. Sophie’s first job: interning at Google. Her challenge: helping a hyper-growth customer whose Kafka Streams app was about to hit partition-based scalability limits. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and...

Viktor Gamov talks to Dhiraj Suri (Confluent) about his career in systems engineering and stream governance. Dhiraj’s first job: software developer at NetApp. His challenge: working at Splunk to stitch together disparate systems into an event-driven provisioning platform. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Moha...

Tim Berglund talks to Daniel Hinojosa (an independent consultant) about his career in software development, data engineering, and event-driven architecture. Daniel’s first job: Sears credit card telemarketing. His challenge: working at a company with internal bad blood and being called at 11 p.m. to pull off a late night “security research” hack on Windows and Lotus Notes systems. SEASON 2 Hosted...

Tim Berglund talks to Mike Agnich (Confluent) about his career in product leadership and startups. Mike’s first job: refereeing youth basketball. His challenge: leading product across connectors, governance, stream processing, and partnerships at Confluent. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed Music by Co...

Adi Polak talks to Gwen Shapira (Nile) about her career in databases and data infrastructure. Gwen’s first job: a side hustle fixing computers. Her challenge: figuring out why a production report at HP slowed down dramatically after daylight saving time. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed Music by Coast...

Tim Berglund talks to Pratik Patel (Azul Systems) about his career in developer relations and Java. Pratik’s first job: computer lab assistant at UNC Chapel Hill. His challenge: working at a large enterprise with manual, slow build processes and transforming them through automation. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and...