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!

Adrian Cockcroft has been a great supporter of my work around microservices, and I was really grateful he was able to find the time to catch up with me at Yow 2015 late last year.

Few people have done as much to help share the power of the cloud in recent years as Adrian, but he certainly has a career that predates the explosion of Amazon Web Services. In episode 22 of the Magpie Talkshow, he shares is journey so far in the IT industry, from physics to venture capital firm Battery Ventures, with stops at Sun, EBay and Netflix in-between.

We also find time to talk about the future of memory, security & compliance, bad puns and flying spaghetti monster simulators.

As always you can find more information about the episode over at the blog: http://samnewman.io/blog/2016/10/08/magpie-talkshow-episode-22-adrian-cockcroft/

In episode 21 of the Magpie Talkshow, I interview NASA Scientist Dr Kamal Oudrhiri, who led the radio sciences team for the recent Mars Curiosity Lander.

For more information on this episode, along with, links and videos, please check out my blog: http://samnewman.io/blog/2016/09/19/magpie-talkshow-episode-21-kamal-oudrhiri-nasa-special-part-2/

As always, please do subscribe, leave a comment or a review!

In episode 20 of the Magpie Talkshow, I interview NASA Scientist Dr Anita Sengupta, who was the Lead Systems Engineer on the parachute system for the recent Mars Curiosity Lander.

For more information, links and videos, please check out my blog: http://samnewman.io/blog/2016/09/08/magpie-talkshow-episode-20-anita-sengputa-nasa-special/

Welcome back to the Magpie Talkshow Podcast! It's been too long (almost exactly 3 months) since I got the last episode out, and despite having a healthy backlog of interviews recorded I've been unable to find the time to get them out. Since then, a number of things have happened including me moving on from ThoughtWorks, where I have worked for over 12 years. I’ll be sharing more about why I made that decision and what comes next over on my blog at some point soon.

In this, the 19th episode of the podcast, I chat to Aino Corry. Aino, believe it or not, develops developers! We caught up at the Yow conference late last year, just one of a number of conferences in which she plays a key part. We chatted about a number of things including what being a meta-developer means, how to run conferences, diversity in IT, and the importance of retrospectives.

You can follow Aino on twitter @apaipi, and find more details about her work over on Meta Developer at http://metadeveloper.com or via Linked In at https://www.linkedin.com/in/aino-vonge-corry-9a23801.

In this week's episode I chat to Kathleen Fisher, a professor at Tufts University. I caught up with Kathleen during the first stop of the three city Yow 2015 conference late last year, where she was delivering the opening keynote on the topic of formal methods.

Back in university I struggled with the topic of formal verification of software. The amount of work required to formally, mathematically, prove a given implementation actually did what you hoped, always seemed to be an order of magnitude too great. But Kathleen's incredibly entertaining and informative keynote showed me how much the topic has come on.

In our interview, we talk about her work in this area, including about how formally verified systems can greatly help improve the security of systems, from off the shelf quadcoptoers to full-sized unmanned helicopters. She also explains how even systems with small amounts of formally proved software can still be useful, and why it's important to know if your in-car entertainment system is actually backed by a fully fledged linux OS, especially if someone has a dodgy encoding of some classical music lying around!

You can find out more about Kathleen's work here: www.cs.tufts.edu/~kfisher/Kathlee…Fisher/Home.html.

Her Yow keynote is now also available here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aFeGGyi19A and see her latest talk here: prezi.com/wr41rmfmhotj/using-f…hare&utm_medium=copy.

After far too long a hiatus, the Magpie Talkshow is back with it's 17th episode. This week we wrap up the last of the interviews I recorded at Øredev last year, and hear my chat with Android developer Corey Latislaw. Mobile development in general is somewhat outside my wheelhouse, so I was very keen to hear about the challenges in that space. At Øredev, Corey did a talk about Android as the world phone, and during our interview we touch on a number of aspects of developing solutions for the emerging world, and how as a mobile developer you can start targetting the next 5 billion users.

We also find time to talk about the merits of minesweeper for identifying algorithmic aptitude, Corey's work helping bring small-scale solar to off-grid communities, and why Android fragmentation might not be as bad as you might have previously heard.

You can find more about Corey here: http://coreylatislaw.com, find more about Off Grid Electric here: http://offgrid-electric.com, and follow her on twitter here: https://twitter.com/corey_latislaw.

Distributed systems can be pretty hard things to understand, so I'm always on the lookout for someone who manages to explain these things well. Neha Narula is one such person, and I was lucky enough to see one of her sessions at Øredev late last year.

After spending several years researching distributed systems at Google, Neha is now working at the MIT Media Lab looking into uses of the blockchain. During our interview, we talk about distributed databases, why distributed transactions can be a pretty good solution sometimes, and how much Postgres rocks!

You can follow Neha on Twitter @neha, and find her blog at http://transientneha.blogspot.com/.

Back in November, again at the Øredev conference, I sat down with an old colleague of mine, Ben Stopford. After starting out in physics (specialising in cosmology no less!) Ben shifted over to computing, where he has been ever since. After leaving ThoughtWorks, he spent much of his time in financial institutions working in the areas of high performance computing and data engineering.

Since then he has taken up a role at Confluent, the company behind the Kafka distributed message broker. During our interview we talk about the challenges of handling volume at scale, why Kafka is different to other sorts of message brokers, and which Fortran is the best Fortran!

As always, lots of links:

* Kafka: http://kafka.apache.org/

* Confluent: http://www.confluent.io/

* Follow Ben on Twitter: @benstopford

* From Øredev: Elements Of Scale http://oredev.org/2015/sessions/elements-of-scale-composing-and-scaling-data-platforms

* Another of his talks from Øredev: The Future Of Data Technology http://oredev.org/2015/sessions/the-future-of-data-technology

*** When I first put this episode out, there was a glitch at the end with overlaid speech. This is now fixed! ***

I've enjoyed all the interviews I've done for The Magpie Talkshow so far, but some do stick out more than others. Often the key distinction is the enthusiasm the interviewee has for a given topic - their passion really shines through when I listen back. Sam Aaron, this week's guest on the show, is a great example of this.

I've known Sam for a while. Back when we first met, he was using Overtone to create music using Clojure. Nowadays he works in research at Cambridge University, where amongst other things he works on SonicPi, a Ruby-based tool for making music and livecoding. During the episode, we explore his work on SonicPi, the challenges of live coding, how graphing calculators rock and why Aphex Twin should be using code to create his music.

Sam's main passion isn't necessarily music, more the idea that coding can and should be seen as a creative endeavour. As he puts it in the podcast, wouldn't it be dull if we only used English to describe business logic, rather than plays or poetry? Sam hopes that platforms like SonicPi can shine a light on the potential for code to enable other things.

SonicPi itself is now on the default distribution for the Raseberry Pi, and is being used all over to help children code (which is a neat link back to Lynn Langit's work all the way back in episode 1). But it isn't just for kids! It's easy to use, comes with a great set of tutorials, and if you needed any encouragement to give it a go, then just listen to the episode :-)

When not working on SonicPi itself, Sam uses it in live events - I was lucky enough to see him perform at an after-hours concert at Øredev after seeing an earlier talk all about livecoding, and I'd highly recommend seeing Sam in person or at least watching one of the various videos of his work available to get a sense of how it all works. The talk he gave at Øredev is probably a good place to start.

Sam's Homepage: http://sam.aaron.name/

His talk at Øredev: https://vimeo.com/144751429

SonicPi: http://sonic-pi.net/

Examples of his live coding: https://www.livecoding.tv/samaaron/

A recent interview he did with the BBC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbgOfrvXsGk