How AI Is Changing Apache Iceberg with Russell Spitzer | Ep. 30
In this episode, Adi Pollack talks with Russell (Rysel) Spitzer, a principal software engineer at Snowflake, about the upcoming Apache Iceberg version 4 and how AI and streaming workloads are reshaping its design. Spitzer explains new vertical table updates that let columns be added or replaced without rewriting entire files, and the dual strategies for handling multimodal data—embedding it in Parquet files or storing external references with lifecycle management. He also details metadata‑tree optimizations that shrink commit latency to a single small I/O operation, enabling rapid streaming commits. Overall, the conversation highlights Iceberg’s evolution to support AI‑driven feature vectors, unstructured assets, and high‑throughput streaming while keeping the format lean and performant.
Building Banking Systems with Kafka Streams with Mateo Rojas | Ep. 28
In this episode, Mateo Rojas recounts his early‑day experiences building a policy‑management platform for a banking‑type application using Kafka Streams when the technology was still nascent. He describes the challenges of orchestrating multiple microservices via stream joins, handling windowing limits,...
Inside OpenAI’s Streaming Backbone with Aravind Suresh | Ep. 24
In this episode, Aravind Suresh, head of OpenAI's real‑time infrastructure team, explains how the company built a highly reliable, scalable streaming backbone for products like ChatGPT using Kafka and Flink. He describes the challenges of scaling a streaming platform tenfold...
The 1 Billion Row Challenge with Gunnar Morling | Ep. 23
In this episode, Tim talks with Gunnar Morling, a principal technologist at Confluent and a key contributor to projects like Hibernate and Debezium, about his "One Billion Row Challenge"—a viral coding contest he launched for the Java community in January...
Killing Clusters & Orchestrating Chaos with Colt McNealy | Ep. 20
In this episode Tim Berglund talks with Colt McNealy, founder and CEO of Little Horse, about building a Kafka‑based platform for orchestrating microservice workflows and AI agents. Colt describes how his early experience debugging monolithic code with GDB contrasted with...
Fail Fast & Ship It with Jeremy Custenborder | Ep. 18
In this episode, Viktor Gamov interviews Jeremy Custenborder of Confluent about his journey from a paper boy to a leader in large‑scale systems, focusing on his experience keeping MySpace operational at massive pre‑cloud scale. Jeremy explains how he built custom...
From “This May Never Work” To WarpStream with Richie Artoul | Ep. 17
In this episode, Tim Berglund chats with data infrastructure veteran Richie Artoul about his unconventional path—from running a LAN gaming café to building log storage at Datadog and now leading WarpStream at Confluent. Richie shares the technical and cultural challenges...
Inside $3M GPU Racks: Powering Modern AI with Bryan Oliver | Ep. 16
In this episode, Adi Polak interviews Bryan Oliver of Thoughtworks about his journey from building swimming pools to engineering massive GPU racks for AI workloads. Oliver explains the technical and operational challenges of running $3M GPU data centers, focusing on...
Hacking Kafka Streams with Sophie Blee‑Goldman | Ep. 15
In this episode, Tim Berglund interviews Sophie Blee‑Goldman of Responsive about her journey from a Google internship to becoming a specialist in container orchestration and Kafka Streams. They dive into the technical challenge of scaling a Kafka Streams application for...
Turning Chaos Into Push-Button Provisioning with Dhiraj Suri| Ep. 14
In this episode, Viktor Gamov interviews Dhiraj Suri of Confluent about his journey from a software developer at NetApp to a systems engineering leader focused on stream governance. Dhiraj explains how he tackled the challenge of integrating fragmented tools at...