In this episode, I welcome Otavio Santana (author and Java Champion) back to the show! Listen as Otavio and I talk about his two latest books "Mastering the Java Virtual Machine" and "Java Persistence with NoSQL." We discuss a little about Apache Cassandra® with Java, garbage collection, and the perils of writing two books in a single year.

In this first episode after a year-end break, I had a chance to talk with longtime community member Jon Haddad. Jon has a storied career of working on some of the largest Cassandra clusters in the world. Listen in, as we talk about some of the clusters that he's worked on, the lessons learned, and a little about his new gig, RustyRazorblade consulting.

For this episode, I had a great conversation with Jonathan Ellis (DataStax founder and former Apache Cassandra® PMC Chair). Listen in to hear us talk a little about the formation of DataStax, the early days of the Cassandra project, and Jonathan's trials and tribulations while building Vector Search for Cassandra.

We tried something a little different in this episode, as Sarma Pydipally comes on to the show to interview Aaron! Listen in as we discuss a little about Aaron's career path, working with early versions of Apache Cassandra®, and his upcoming talk at the Cassandra Summit (in December) about leveraging Vector Search in E-commerce!

Want to learn more about Apache Cassandra® as an AI datastore? Listen in as I talk with Dr. Charna Parkey, while we discuss her career journey from engineer to data scientist, the evolution of Kaskada, some implications of AI, and AI workloads that benefit from Cassandra.

This week, I sat down with Aaron Morton to talk about his upcoming talk at the Cassandra Summit in December. We also discussed Aaron's work with the Mongoose project, and improving the Cassandra developer experience with a JSON API that includes Vector Search!

For this episode, I caught up with Otavio Santana, one of our guests from the first season. Otavio and I discussed his new book "Persistence Best Practices for Java Applications" which was just released on Aug 25th. Listen in to hear Otavio and I discuss how Apache Cassandra® fits into the landscape of Java application persistence, the role that cloud native tech plays, as well as practices for building good DTOs in Java.

In this episode I had a great discussion with German Eichberger and Theo van Kraay of Microsoft. We talked about the Azure Managed Instance for Apache CassandraⓇ service at Microsoft, Java at Microsoft, and a little history about the Azure Cosmos DB for Apache Cassandra API. If you want to hear about migrating between clusters on the Azure cloud, then this is the episode for you!

For today's episode, I sat down with Mary Grygleski of DataStax. Mary is a Developer Advocate on the Astra Streaming team, evangelizing for and helping folks with Apache Pulsar®. She has a long history as both an advocate and an engineer in tech, organizes the Chicago Java Users' Group (CJUG), and has been recognized as a Java Champion. Listen in and hear how we discussed Java, Apache Cassandra®, Pulsar, and Mary's talk for the upcoming Cassandra Summit.

In this episode, I caught up with Rahul Singh of Anant Corporation. We had a great discussion about how he started Anant, as well as some of the challenges of working with Cassandra (and other "big data" tech) in the C#/.Net world. Additionally, we go on to discuss how Anant's "Cassandra Lunches" (on YouTube) came about, as well as ways to help newer folks learn the Cassandra ecosystem.