Tim Berglund picks the brain of a distributed systems engineer, Guozhang Wang, tech lead in the Streaming department of Confluent. Guozhang explains what compelled him to join the Stream Processing team at Confluent coming from the Apache Kafka® core infrastructure.

Roger Hoover, one of the first engineers to work on Confluent Cloud, joins Tim Berglund to chat about the evolution of Confluent Cloud, all the stages that it’s been through, and the lessons he’s learned on the way.

What's it like being a distributed systems engineer? Apurva Mehta explains what attracted him to Apache Kafka®, the challenges and uniqueness of distributed systems, and how to excel in this industry.

Gwen Shapira shares about what it's like to be a distributed systems engineer at Confluent and best tips for approaching a project like Apache Kafka. She talks through the steps she took to get to Confluent and how she got started working with Apache Kafka, including her experience as on the PMC for the Apache Software Foundation.

Jun Rao (Co-founder, Confluent) explains what relational databases and distributed databases are, how they work, and major differences between the two. He also delves into important lessons he’s learned along the way through the transition from the relational world to the distributed world.