Confluent

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

Hi, we’re Tim Berglund, Adi Polak, and Viktor Gamov and we’re excited to bring you the Confluent Developer podcast (formerly “Streaming Audio.”) Our hand-crafted weekly episodes feature in-depth interviews with our community of software developers (actual human beings - not AI) talking about some of the most interesting challenges they’ve faced in their careers. We aim to explore the conditions that gave rise to each person’s technical hurdles, as well as how their experiences transformed their understanding and approach to building systems.  Whether you’re a seasoned open source data streamin...

Author

Confluent

Category

Technology

Podcast website

developer.confluent.io

Latest episode

Jun 22, 2026

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Episodes

Reimagining Stream Processing with Matthias J. Sax | Ep. 9 17.11.2025

Viktor Gamov talks to Matthias J. Sax (Confluent) about his career in stream processing and, specifically, Kafka Streams. Matthias’ first job: an electrician-in-training on BMW’s assembly lines. His challenge: building Kafka Streams at Confluent with a focus on API design, backward compatibility, and a library-first approach that also fits microservices. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak...

How Time Kills All Deals in Pre-Sales with Rachel Pedreschi | Ep. 8 10.11.2025

Listen: https://confluent.buzzsprout.com | In this episode, Tim Berglund talks to his guest, Rachel Pedreschi (DeltaStream), about her career in pre-sales engineering. Her first job: rectory office assistant at her local parish. Her challenge/theme: working at early-stage startups to bridge sales, marketing, and engineering to reach product-market fit. Check out Tim and Rachel's previous podc...

Scaling AI in Engineering with Peter Bell | Ep. 7 03.11.2025

Listen: https://confluent.buzzsprout.com | Today, Adi Polak talks to her guest, Peter Bell (gather.dev), about his career in software engineering leadership, CTO community building, and AI-driven development. Peter’s first job: electronics lab technician at their school (alongside shifts at Tesco). His challenge/theme: working at scale with AI adoption and change management. Check out gather.dev:...

How Kafka Expert Robin Moffat Tackles Open Source Problems | Ep. 6 27.10.2025

Today, Viktor Gamov talks to his colleague Robin Moffat (Confluent) about his career in data engineering. His first job: paperboy. His challenge: working at a retailer with Oracle materialized views as well as teaching others how to productively approach Kafka’s internal systems. Blog posts mentioned in the podcast: ► Oracle Materialized Views troubleshooting: https://rnm1978.wordpress.com/2011/01...

Building Parquet into Apache Pinot ft. Neha Pawar | Ep. 5 20.10.2025

Today, Tim Berglund talks to Neha Pawar (StarTree) about her career in real-time analytics and open source database engineering. Her first job: a year-long internship at NVIDIA. Her challenge: leading the technical effort to add native Parquet support into Apache Pinot. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohame...

The Fix That Secured 1000s of Credit Cards ft. Brian Sletten | Ep. 4 13.10.2025

In this episode, Tim talks to Brian Sletten (Bosatsu Consulting) about his career in software development. His first job: working at a small communications company that built network matrix switch interfaces. His challenge/theme: overhauling credit card storage and security at a major hospitality company. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gal...

How Viktor Gamov Stays Curious as Tech Rapidly Evolves | Ep. 3 06.10.2025

Adi Polak interviews her co-host, Viktor Gamov, about his career’s evolution from distributed systems to streaming technology. Viktor’s first job: apple picking. His challenge/theme: staying curious and non-judgmental in the ever-changing landscape of tech. 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...

How Tim Berglund Found His Calling | Ep. 2 29.09.2025

Viktor Gamov interviews his co-host, Tim Berglund, about his career in the world of streaming data. Tim’s first job: Burger King broiler steamer. His challenge/theme: pivoting from working in hardware and firmware to finding his calling in enterprise software and developer relations. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia an...

Building Real-time Systems for Apple, Nike & more ft. Adi Polak | Ep. 1 22.09.2025

The Confluent Developer Podcast is here! For this first episode, Tim Berglund talks to his co-host, Adi Polak (Confluent), about her career in distributed data systems. Her first job: neighborhood dogwalker. Her challenge/theme: early Hadoop, working at Akamai on data optimization and real-time threat detection for huge global customers like Apple, Nike, Facebook and others, and the power of colla...

We're back! Welcome to the Confluent Developer Podcast. 02.09.2025

Weekly episodes launching Sept. 22! | Hi, I'm Tim Berglund. It's been about four years since I've been podcasting at Confluent, and "Streaming Audio" has been on hiatus for a little more than two, but I've got great news: we are back!  We're back with a new name, a new format, and new hosts. Welcome to the Confluent Developer Podcast, where we talk to software de...

Apache Kafka 3.5 - Kafka Core, Connect, Streams, & Client Updates 15.06.2023

Apache Kafka® 3.5 is here with the capability of previewing migrations between ZooKeeper clusters to KRaft mode. Follow along as Danica Fine highlights key release updates. Kafka Core: KIP-833 provides an updated timeline for KRaft. KIP-866 now is preview and allows migration from an existing ZooKeeper cluster to KRaft mode. KIP-900 introduces a way to bootstrap the KRaft controllers with SCRAM cr...

A Special Announcement from Streaming Audio 13.04.2023

After recording 64 episodes and featuring 58 amazing guests, the Streaming Audio podcast series has amassed over 130,000 plays on YouTube in the last year. We're extremely proud of these achievements and feel that it's time to take a well-deserved break. Streaming Audio will be taking a vacation! We want to express our gratitude to you, our valued listeners, for spending 10,000 hours wit...

How to use Data Contracts for Long-Term Schema Management 21.03.2023

Have you ever struggled with managing data long term, especially as the schema changes over time? In order to manage and leverage data across an organization, it’s essential to have well-defined guidelines and standards in place around data quality, enforcement, and data transfer. To get started, Abraham Leal (Customer Success Technical Architect, Confluent) suggests that organizations associate t...

How to use Python with Apache Kafka 14.03.2023

Can you use Apache Kafka® and Python together? What’s the current state of Python support? And what are the best options to get started? In this episode, Dave Klein joins Kris to talk about all things Kafka and Python: the libraries, the tools, and the pros & cons. He also talks about the new course he just launched to support Python programmers entering the event-streaming world. Dave has bee...

Next-Gen Data Modeling, Integrity, and Governance with YODA 07.03.2023

In this episode, Kris interviews Doron Porat, Director of Infrastructure at Yotpo, and Liran Yogev, Director of Engineering at ZipRecruiter (formerly at Yotpo), about their experiences and strategies in dealing with data modeling at scale. Yotpo has a vast and active data lake, comprising thousands of datasets that are processed by different engines, primarily Apache Spark™. They wanted to provide...

Migrate Your Kafka Cluster with Minimal Downtime 01.03.2023

Migrating Apache Kafka® clusters can be challenging, especially when moving large amounts of data while minimizing downtime. Michael Dunn (Solutions Architect, Confluent) has worked in the data space for many years, designing and managing systems to support high-volume applications. He has helped many organizations strategize, design, and implement successful Kafka cluster migrations between diffe...

Real-Time Data Transformation and Analytics with dbt Labs 22.02.2023

dbt is known as being part of the Modern Data Stack for ELT processes. Being in the MDS, dbt Labs believes in having the best of breed for every part of the stack. Oftentimes folks are using an EL tool like Fivetran to pull data from the database into the warehouse, then using dbt to manage the transformations in the warehouse. Analysts can then build dashboards on top of that data, or execute tes...

What is the Future of Streaming Data? 15.02.2023

What’s the next big thing in the future of streaming data? In this episode, Greg DeMichillie (VP of Product and Solutions Marketing, Confluent) talks to Kris about the future of stream processing in environments where the value of data lies in their ability to intercept and interpret data. Greg explains that organizations typically focus on the infrastructure containers themselves, and not on the...

What can Apache Kafka Developers learn from Online Gaming? 08.02.2023

What can online gaming teach us about making large-scale event management more collaborative in real-time? Ben Gamble (Developer Relations Manager, Aiven)  has come to the world of real-time event streaming from an usual source: the video games industry. And if you stop to think about it, modern online games are complex, distributed real-time data systems with decades of innovative techniques to t...

Apache Kafka 3.4 - New Features & Improvements 07.02.2023

Apache Kafka® 3.4 is released! In this special episode, Danica Fine (Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent), shares highlights of the Apache Kafka 3.4 release. This release introduces new KIPs in Kafka Core, Kafka Streams, and Kafka Connect. In Kafka Core: KIP-792 expands the metadata each group member passes to the group leader in its JoinGroup subscription to include the highest stable generation...

How to use OpenTelemetry to Trace and Monitor Apache Kafka Systems 01.02.2023

How can you use OpenTelemetry to gain insight into your Apache Kafka® event systems? Roman Kolesnev, Staff Customer Innovation Engineer at Confluent, is a member of the Customer Solutions & Innovation Division Labs team working to build business-critical OpenTelemetry applications so companies can see what’s happening inside their data pipelines. In this episode, Roman joins Kris to discuss tr...

What is Data Democratization and Why is it Important? 26.01.2023

Data democratization allows everyone in an organization to have access to the data they need, and the necessary tools needed to use this data effectively. In short, data democratization enables better business decisions.  In this episode, Rama Ryali, a Senior IT and Data Executive, chats with Kris Jenkins about the importance of data democratization in modern systems. Rama explains that tech has u...

Git for Data: Managing Data like Code with lakeFS 19.01.2023

Is it possible to manage and test data like code? lakeFS is an open-source data version control tool that transforms object storage into Git-like repositories, offering teams a way to use the same workflows for code and data. In this episode, Kris sits down with guest Adi Polak, VP of DevX at Treeverse, to discuss how lakeFS can be used to facilitate better management and testing of data. At its c...

Using Kafka-Leader-Election to Improve Scalability and Performance 12.01.2023

How does leader election work in Apache Kafka®? For the past 2 ½ years, Adithya Chandra, Staff Software Engineer at Confluent, has been working on Kafka scalability and performance, specifically partition leader election. In this episode, he gives Kris Jenkins a deep dive into the power of leader election in Kafka replication, why we need it, how it works, what can go wrong, and how it's bein...

Real-Time Machine Learning and Smarter AI with Data Streaming 05.01.2023

Are bad customer experiences really just data integration problems? Can real-time data streaming and machine learning be democratized in order to deliver a better customer experience? Airy, an open-source data-streaming platform, uses Apache Kafka® to help business teams deliver better results to their customers. In this episode, Airy CEO and co-founder Steffen Hoellinger explains how his company...

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