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

Confluent
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Mar 30, 2026 • 38min

How Maven Changed Java Forever with Baruch Sadogursky | Ep. 25

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. ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.
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Mar 23, 2026 • 31min

Inside OpenAI’s Streaming Backbone with Aravind Suresh | Ep. 24

Adi Polak talks to Arvind 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. ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.
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Mar 16, 2026 • 30min

The 1 Billion Row Challenge with Gunnar Morling | Ep. 23

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 on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.
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Mar 9, 2026 • 35min

From Git Blame to Principal Engineer with Sage Pierce | Ep. 22

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 Nurie Mohamed Music by Coastal Kites Artwork by Phil Vo  🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.
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Mar 2, 2026 • 37min

From Coding Machines to Leading Humans ft. Leonid Igolnik | Ep. 21

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/0316172324SEASON 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 YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.
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Feb 23, 2026 • 38min

Killing Clusters & Orchestrating Chaos with Colt McNealy | Ep. 20

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-engineGunnar Morling's blog: https://www.morling.dev/blog/Jack Vanlightly's blog: https://jack-vanlightly.com/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 YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.
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Feb 16, 2026 • 26min

Deleting Architecture for Better Systems ft. Daniel Doubrovkine | Ep. 19

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 YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.
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Feb 9, 2026 • 27min

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 listen to podcasts. ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.
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Feb 2, 2026 • 30min

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. ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.
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Jan 26, 2026 • 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 Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.

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