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

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 by Phil Vo 

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 Coastal Kit...

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
Hosted by Tim B...

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 

• &n...

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 Mohamed
Music b...

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 an...

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, P...

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&...

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 

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 
A...

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 
Artw...

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 Ber...

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 ...

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://...

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 ...

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 Coas...

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 ...

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 Mohame...

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
Musi...