Adi Polak

Adi Polak, a developer relations leader at Confluent, shares her fascinating journey from dog walker to building large-scale analytics at Akamai. She discusses the challenges of optimizing real-time threat detection and how collaboration shaped her career. Learn about the key innovations in analytics for identifying DDoS attacks and the importance of empathy and trust in engineering success. Adi emphasizes the significance of long-term investments in developing robust analytics platforms.

Adi Polak, Director at Confluent and author focused on streaming systems and ML engineering. He discusses context engineering as a stateful alternative to prompt-only approaches. Topics include turning prompts into reusable skills, building agentic workflows with long-term memory, using event streams like Kafka and Flink to enrich model context, and practical tips for experimenting with AI-enabled developer tooling.