
Fail Fast & Ship It with Jeremy Custenborder | Ep. 18
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 ...
9 Feb 27min

From “This May Never Work” to WarpStream with Richie Artoul | Ep. 17
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. ▶️ Sub...
2 Feb 30min

Inside $3M GPU Racks: Powering Modern AI with Bryan Oliver | Ep. 16
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 Confluen...
26 Jan 30min

Hacking Kafka Streams with Sophie Blee‑Goldman | Ep. 15
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 Develo...
19 Jan 34min

Turning Chaos into Push-Button Provisioning with Dhiraj Suri| Ep. 14
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...
12 Jan 21min

The Late Night Hack That Changed Daniel Hinojosa's Career | Ep. 13
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 Furi...
5 Jan 16min

From Early Startups to Product Leadership with Mike Agnich | Ep. 12
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 ...
15 Dec 202518min

Adventures in Data Infrastructure with Gwen Shapira | Ep. 11
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 pod...
8 Dec 202521min






















