Best Apache Kafka® Podcasts (2025)

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Scaling AI in Engineering with Peter Bell | Ep. 7 27:16

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3d ago27:16

27:16

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 adop…

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Building Observable Systems with eBPF and Linux (with Mohammed Aboullaite) 1:11:24

6d ago1:11:24

1:11:24

How do you monitor distributed systems that span dozens of microservices, multiple languages, and different databases? The old approach of gathering logs from different machines and recompiling apps with profiling flags doesn't scale when you're running thousands of servers. You need a unified strategy that works everywhere, on every component, in …

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How Kafka Expert Robin Moffat Tackles Open Source Problems | Ep. 6 24:50

10d ago24:50

24:50

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 trou…

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Building Parquet into Apache Pinot ft. Neha Pawar | Ep. 5 26:07

17d ago26:07

26:07

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…

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Matt Althauser & Alex Boswell, Founding Partners Of Polychrome 35:43

19d ago35:43

35:43

Achieving your financial goals in the world of commercial open-source requires careful planning and strong commitment. Ben Rometsch is joined by Matt Althauser and Alex Boswell, founding partners of Polychrome, who share their journey from hitting their first $10k annual recurring revenue to reaching their first $1M ARR. Matt and Alex talks about t…

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The Fix That Secured 1000s of Credit Cards ft. Brian Sletten | Ep. 4 29:37

24d ago29:37

29:37

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 …

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Solving Git's Pain Points with Jujutsu (with Martin von Zweigbergk) 1:11:38

28d ago1:11:38

1:11:38

Git might be the most ubiquitous tool in software development, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. What if we could keep Git compatibility while fixing its most frustrating aspects—painful merges, scary rebases, being stuck in conflict states, and the confusing staging area? This week we're joined by Martin von Zweigbergk, creator of Jujutsu (JJ), …

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How Viktor Gamov Stays Curious as Tech Rapidly Evolves | Ep. 3 30:11

1M ago30:11

30:11

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 Ga…

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How Tim Berglund Found His Calling | Ep. 2 30:36

1M ago30:36

30:36

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 Produ…

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Jason Bosco, CEO & Co-Founder Of Typesense 36:14

1M ago36:14

36:14

Ben Rometsch explores the superpowers of running an open-source startup with return guest Jason Bosco, CEO and co-founder of Typesense. Jason shares how their company achieved impressive growth by cultivating community building and collaboration through well-crafted one-source projects. He also talks about the role of open-source in creating engagi…

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Getting New Technology Adopted (with Dov Katz) 1:05:15

1M ago1:05:15

1:05:15

Getting new technology adopted in a large organization can feel like pushing water uphill. The best tools in the world are useless if we're not allowed to use them, and as companies grow, their habits turn into inertia, then into "the way we've always done things." So how do you break through that resistance and get meaningful change to happen? Thi…

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Building Real-time Systems for Apple, Nike & more ft. Adi Polak | Ep. 1 32:53

2M ago32:53

32:53

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,…

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From Unit Tests to Whole Universe Tests (with Will Wilson) 1:12:12

2M ago1:12:12

1:12:12

How confident are you when your test suite goes green? If you're honest, probably not 100% confident - because most bugs come from scenarios we never thought to test. Traditional testing only catches the problems we anticipate, but the 3am pager alerts? Those come from the unexpected interactions, timing issues, and edge cases we never imagined. In…

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Kyle Johnson, Co-Founder Of Flagsmith 32:11

2M ago32:11

32:11

Ben Rometsch chats with Kyle Johnson, co-founder of Flagsmith, about their 11-year journey together in the commercial open-source software (COSS) space. He talks about his transition from engineering to entrepreneur and back again by detailing how he navigated the evolution of his career. Kyle discusses how they have developed feature flagging as a…

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We're back! Welcome to the Confluent Developer Podcast. 1:20

2M ago1:20

1:20

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 …

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Building Render: Inside a Modern Cloud Platform (with Anurag Goel) 1:24:57

3M ago1:24:57

1:24:57

How would you build a Heroku-like platform from scratch? This week we're diving deep into the world of cloud platforms and infrastructure with Anurag Goel, founder and CEO of Render. Starting from the seemingly simple task of hosting a web service, we quickly discover why building a production-ready platform is far more complex than it appears. Why…

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InfluxDB: The Evolution of a Time Series Database (with Paul Dix) 1:49:23

3M ago1:49:23

1:49:23

How hard is it to write a good database engine? Hard enough that sometimes it takes several versions to get it just right. Paul Dix joins us this week to talk about his journey building InfluxDB, and he's refreshingly frank about what went right, and what went wrong. Sometimes the real database is the knowledge you pick up along the way.... Paul wa…

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Beyond AI Hype, What Will Developers Actually Use? (with Zach Lloyd) 1:18:06

4M ago1:18:06

1:18:06

If AI coding tools are here to stay, what form will they take? How will we use them? Will they be just another window in our IDE, will they push their way to the centre of our development experience, displacing the editor? No one knows, but Zach Lloyd is making a very interesting bet with the latest version of Warp. In this deep dive, Zach walks us…

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The $500 Billion Integration Problem, And One Possible Solution (with Marty Pitt) 1:31:33

4M ago1:31:33

1:31:33

Ever wondered why data integration is still such a nightmare in 2025? Marty Pitt has built something that might finally solve it. TaxiQL isn't just another query language - it's a semantic layer that lets you query across any system without caring about field names, API differences, or where the data actually lives. Instead of writing endless mappi…

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Making Software Crash Before It Breaks (with Isaac Van Doren) 57:08

5M ago57:08

57:08

At 23, Isaac is already jaded about software reliability - and frankly, he's got good reason to be. When your grandmother can't access her medical records because a username change broke the entire system, when bugs routinely make people's lives harder, you start to wonder: why do we just accept that software is broken most of the time? Isaac's ans…

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Making Apache Kafka Diskless (with Filip Yonov & Josep Prat) 1:29:29

5M ago1:29:29

1:29:29

How do you retrofit a clustered data-processing system to use cheap commodity storage? That’s the big question in this episode as we look at one of the many attempts to build a version of Kafka that uses object storage services like S3 as its main disk, sacrificing a little latency for cheap, infinitely-scalable disks. There are several companies t…

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Java's Cutting Edge Comeback (with Josh Long) 1:24:29

6M ago1:24:29

1:24:29

Java’s has been evolving faster than any 30 year old language has a right to do, and there’s probably no-one more pleased about it than my guest this week - Josh Long. He’s a Java & Kotlin programming, a JVM enthusiast in general, and an advocate for Spring, and he has chapters full of news about what’s been happening in Javaland over the past few …

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The State & Future of Apache Kafka (with Anatoly Zelenin) 1:12:22

6M ago1:12:22

1:12:22

I’m joined this week by one of the authors of Apache Kafka In Action, to take a look at the state of Kafka, event systems & stream-processing technology. It’s an approach (and a whole market) that’s had at least a decade to mature, so how has it done? What does Kafka offer to developers and businesses, and which parts do they actually care about? W…

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AI-in-BI: The Roadmap for Superset and Beyond 1:00:36

6M ago1:00:36

1:00:36

We'll be exploring how the Apache Superset project (and Preset) have been making moves toward AI/LLM features, what SIPs are open on this topic, and what we consider to be the path for AI in BI as a generalized practice, as an extension to this blog post.

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DataFusion - The Database Building Toolkit (with Andrew Lamb) 1:32:10

7M ago1:32:10

1:32:10

Building a database is a serious undertaking. There are just so many parts that you have to implement before you even get to a decent prototype, and so many hours of work before you could begin working on the ideas that would make your database unique. Apache DataFusion is a project that hopes to change all that, but building an extensible, composa…

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Jupyter's Architecture Unpacked (with Afshin Darian & Sylvain Corlay) 1:29:11

7M ago1:29:11

1:29:11

Jupyter’s become an incredibly popular programming and data science tool, but how does it actually work? How have they built an interactive language execution engine? And if we understand the architecture, what else could it be used for? Joining me to look inside the Jupyter toolbox are Afshin Darian and Sylvain Corlay, two of Jupyters long-standin…

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AI in BI: the Path to Full Self-Driving Analytics 30:51

7M ago30:51

30:51

As a corollary to Max's new blog post, "AI in BI: The Path to Full Self Drive", this episode is a bit of.... an experiment. It explores how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing business intelligence (BI), from accelerating data analysis and surfacing key insights to enabling predictive models and automating decision-making. AI is changing how…

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Nix, The Build-Everything Language (with Julian Arni) 1:20:36

8M ago1:20:36

1:20:36

Ever since we invented makefiles, the programming world has been wrestling with the problem of building software stacks reliably. This week we’re going to look at one of the most ambitious solutions available - Nix. Nix tries to do everything from invoking your compiler to installing your language, and even providing your operating system. But how …

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Graphite: Image Editing as a Syntax Tree (with Keavon Chambers & Dennis Kobert) 1:17:32

8M ago1:17:32

1:17:32

Graphite is a new image editor with an interesting architecture - it’s a classic UI-driven app, an image-manipulation language, and a library of programmable graphics primitives that any Rust coder could use, extend or add to. The result is something that you can use like Photoshop or Inkscape, or make use of in batch pipelines, a bit like ImageMag…

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Malcolm Matalka: Co-Founder at Terrateam 50:38

9M ago50:38

50:38

Interview With Malcolm Matalka: Co-Founder, Terrateam Ben Rometsch chats with Malcolm Matalka, co-founder of Terrateam, to discuss the company’s inception and its eventual shift to open source. Together, they discuss how his frustrations with the click ops approach prompted Malcolm to create his own team to disrupt the system and pave the way for m…

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ReScript: A Better Typed JavaScript? (with Gabriel Nordeborn) 1:32:53

9M ago1:32:53

1:32:53

ReScript is a strongly-typed programming language that compiles to JavaScript, and that puts it squarely in competition with TypeScript. So why would a JavaScript developer choose to learn it next? What does it offer that makes it a tempting proposition? And how are the ReScript developers making life easier for anyone who wants to make the switch?…

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Sam Stepanyan, OWASP London Chapter Leader & OWASP Global Board Member 53:21

9M ago53:21

53:21

With almost every transaction being done through the internet, your personal information and finances must be protected at all costs from hackers and scammers. Therefore, cybersecurity is important now more than ever. Leading the charge in keeping the digital world safe and secure is OWASP, a non-profit organization working mainly on software secur…

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A universal query engine in Rust (with Predrag Gruevski) 1:15:31

9M ago1:15:31

1:15:31

Trustfall is a library based on a simple question - what happens if we can query absolutely anything? If you could join REST APIs and databases with filesystems and dockerfiles? It’s possible in theory because those are all just datasources. Predrag Gruevski is trying to make it easy by building a universal query engine, with pluggable datasources,…

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Raspberry Pi Hardware & A Lisp Brain (with Dimitris Kyriakoudis) 1:34:43

10M ago1:34:43

1:34:43

Dimitris Kyriakoudis is a researcher, programmer and musician who's combining all three talents to build dedicated music hardware. Specifically a device called the µseq, which reads Lisp programs and uses them to drive synthesizers to make music. In this episode we go through the full platform that he's building, from soldering resistors to an RPi …

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Chris Villa, Co-Founder of Puck & Measured 50:01

10M ago50:01

50:01

Interview With Chris Villa: Co-Founder, Puck & Measured Puck, an open-source project, has exploded in popularity, becoming a major focus for Chris Villa and his team. But how do you balance a runaway open-source hit with the demands of running a consultancy? Join Ben Rometsch as he sits down with Chris Villa, co-founder of both Puck and Measured, t…

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Software Systems Aren't Just Software (with Diana Montalion) 1:50:14

10M ago1:50:14

1:50:14

If you want to build really large software systems well, you have to stop thinking of them as just software systems. Beyond a certain size, everything your software touches becomes part of the wider system. You’re part of the system, your users are part of the system, and every other employee & department & priority eventually forms part of that sy…

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Building Fyrox: A Rust Game Engine (with Dmitry Stepanov) 1:43:45

10M ago1:43:45

1:43:45

To kick off 2025 we’re looking at Fyrox a game engine built in Rust, largely by one person - Dmitry Stepanov. For an individual project, it’s covered an incredible amount of ground, covering the rendering and animation features you’d expect from a game engine, with some features that might surprise you - like Rust scripting support with hot-reloadi…

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James McLeod: Open Source Program Lead at NatWest Group 56:39

10M ago56:39

56:39

Joining this episode is James McLeod, Open Source Program Lead at NatWest Group. He looks back on his career journey, from his role at the Linux Foundation, his efforts in scaling the FINOS project, to the creation of London.js. Reflecting on the many lessons throughout his professional life, James stressed the importance of proper data documentati…

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Testing TVs At Scale With Elixir (with Dave Lucia) 1:16:05

11M ago1:16:05

1:16:05

Integration testing is always a tricky thing, fraught with problems setting up the right environment and attempting to control the system’s state. That’s particularly true when you’re dealing with a mix of software and hardware, and even worse when you don’t have control of what the hardware can do. This week I’m joined by Dave Lucia of TVLab’s, wh…

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Moritz Klack & Christopher Möller: Co-Founders, xyflow 34:41

11M ago34:41

34:41

This episode features Moritz Klack and Christopher Möller, Co-Founders of xyflow. They look back on their career journey leading to their current company, from developing webkid, creating Datablocks, and launching React Flow. They discuss their transition from agency work to open source, their pricing strategies, and the importance of community fee…

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Programming As An Expressive Instrument (with Sam Aaron) 1:50:01

11M ago1:50:01

1:50:01

Sam Aaron is the creator of Sonic Pi, one of the most unusual software platforms you’ll encounter. It’s a live-coding playground for making music. A tool that lets you write code that defines sounds and musical phrases, and build up a hole program that plays anything from a short bleep to a whole nightclub set. And Sam’s creator has been using it l…

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Elm & The Future of Open Source (with Evan Czaplicki) 50:24

12M ago50:24

50:24

Evan Czaplicki—the creator of the Elm programming language —joins me to discuss the state and future of Elm, the friendly, type-safe functional programming language. On many fronts Elm has been a huge success: it’s been popular with new and seasoned programmers alike; it’s helped push several language ideas into the mainstream; it’s been a key part…