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