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 Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed Music by Coastal Kites Artwork by Phil Vo 🎧 Subscribe to Conf...
Apr 20, 2026•45 min•Season 2Ep. 28
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 by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed Music by Coastal Kites Artwork by Phil Vo 🎧 Sub...
Apr 13, 2026•36 min•Season 2Ep. 27
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 by Phil Vo 🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. ▶️ Subscribe on YouTub...
Apr 06, 2026•29 min
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 Coastal Kites Artwork by Phil Vo 🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. ▶️ Subscr...
Mar 30, 2026•38 min
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 Kites Artwork by Phil Vo 🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. ▶️ Subscri...
Mar 23, 2026•31 min•Season 2Ep. 24
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 Artwork by Phil Vo 🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. ▶️ Subscribe ...
Mar 16, 2026•30 min•Season 2Ep. 23
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 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nu...
Mar 09, 2026•35 min•Season 2Ep. 22
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: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking: https://www.amazon.com/Blink-Power-Thinking-Without/dp/03161...
Mar 02, 2026•37 min
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 Morling's blog: https://www.morling.dev/blog/ Jack Vanlightly's blog: https://jack-vanlightly.com/ SEASON...
Feb 23, 2026•38 min
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 Artwork by Phil Vo 🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. ▶️ Subscribe on YouT...
Feb 16, 2026•26 min•Season 2Ep. 19
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 Music by Coastal Kites Artwork by Phil Vo 🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to ...
Feb 09, 2026•27 min•Season 2Ep. 18
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 Artwork by Phil Vo 🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. ▶️ Subscribe on Y...
Feb 02, 2026•30 min•Season 2Ep. 17
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 Furia and Nurie Mohamed Music by Coastal Kites Artwork by Phil Vo 🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Develope...
Jan 26, 2026•30 min•Season 2Ep. 16
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 Nurie Mohamed Music by Coastal Kites Artwork by Phil Vo 🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever...
Jan 19, 2026•35 min•Season 2Ep. 15
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 Mohamed Music by Coastal Kites Artwork by Phil Vo 🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you liste...
Jan 12, 2026•21 min•Season 2Ep. 14
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 by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and...
Jan 05, 2026•16 min•Season 2Ep. 13
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 Coastal Kites Artwork by Phil Vo 🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. ...
Dec 15, 2025•19 min•Season 2Ep. 12
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 Coastal Kites Artwork by Phil Vo 🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. ▶️ ...
Dec 08, 2025•22 min•Season 2Ep. 11
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 Nurie Mohamed Music by Coastal Kites Artwork by Phil Vo 🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer whereve...
Dec 01, 2025•26 min•Season 2Ep. 10
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 and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed Music by Coa...
Nov 17, 2025•37 min•Season 2Ep. 9
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 podcast, Keyboard and Quill: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLihIrF0tCXdeJxpAJgbOsY48B9lD_w24v&si=5Njd...
Nov 10, 2025•28 min•Season 2Ep. 8
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: https://www.gather.dev/ SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edi...
Nov 03, 2025•27 min•Season 2Ep. 7
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/2011/01/08/materialised-views-pct-partition-truncation/ ► Kafka Listeners explained: https://rmoff.net/2018...
Oct 27, 2025•25 min•Season 2Ep. 6
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 Mohamed Music by Coastal Kites Artwork by Phil Vo 🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen ...
Oct 20, 2025•26 min•Season 2Ep. 5
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 Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed Music by Coastal Kites Artwork by Phil Vo 🎧 Subscribe to Conf...
Oct 13, 2025•30 min•Season 2Ep. 4
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 Coastal Kites Artwork by Phil Vo 🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. ...
Oct 06, 2025•30 min•Season 2Ep. 3
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 and Nurie Mohamed Music by Coastal Kites Artwork by Phil Vo 🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherev...
Sep 29, 2025•31 min•Season 2Ep. 2
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 collaboration. SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle ...
Sep 22, 2025•33 min•Season 2Ep. 1
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 developers of all stripes about some of the most interesting problems they've solved in their career. I'll be joined by my co-hosts, Adi P...
Sep 02, 2025•1 min
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 credentials. KIP-903 prevents a data loss scenario by preventing replicas with stale broker epochs fro...
Jun 15, 2023•11 min•Season 1Ep. 265
