So, after far too long a hiatus, we’re back on the Magpie Talkshow for a one-off episode where I interview Kafka creator and Confluent CEO Jay Kreps. I’ve been doing a small amount of work with Confluent recently, and through this I got the chance to meet Jay, and I thought he’d make a great guest for the show. So in this episode we’re going to learn about Jay’s own journey in the tech industry, as well as diving into the mindset behind Kafka and where you might want to use it. There are a couple of firsts in this episode. Firstly, it was recorded remotely via video conferencing - I think the audio quality is pretty good, largely thanks to the use of zencaster. I did however have to do more editing than usual but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. Secondly We’re also going to be sharing a video of our chat over on confluent's website, and I’ll update this post with a link once it’s available. I do have to apologise for the sporadic nature of the episodes I’m putting out but as is often the case, life get’s in the way. In between our last episode and this one I setup my own company, and left australia for London, where I am currently based. I still plan to publish the occasional episode from time to time, so please do stay subscribed to the feed. Hopefully if things settle down a bit I may get back to a more regular posting schedule! Jay and I talked about a number of things on the podcast, but the main one I wanted to highlight is previous guest Ben Stopford’s really interesting posts on using Kafka for sharing data between microservices. There are some fascinating ideas there which I think can solve problems many of us face when creating finer-grained distributed systems. You can find Ben's posts here: https://www.confluent.io/blog/author/ben/. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the show!