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Several podcast interviews

Published by Martin Kleppmann on 01 Sep 2021.

I regularly get asked to give interviews on the topics that I work on, especially for podcasts. To make them easier to find for anybody who’s interested, I thought I would make a list. They touch on a range of different topics, although there is also some overlap so I wouldn’t recommend listening to them all in a row!

(By the way, if you want a list of conference talks I have given, I have a YouTube playlist for that.)

Here’s a list of interviews I’ve given as of September 2021:

  • Interview with Wix Engineering, in which we discuss my book, the state of Automerge, the convergence of streaming systems and databases, Kafka’s move to replace ZooKeeper with their own Raft implementation, impact of my research, and more. Recorded 16 June 2021, published 26 August 2021. Video, transcript.

  • Interview with the Metamuse podcast, in which we discuss local-first software: how the concept has evolved since we first articulated it, and where it’s heading in the future. Recorded 17 August 2021, published 14 October 2021. Episode link

  • Interview with the Coding over Cocktails podcast, in which we discuss making systems scalable, how data systems have evolved over the years, and local-first software. Recorded 26 August 2021, published 30 August 2021. Episode link and transcript, Soundcloud, iTunes, Google Play.

  • Interview with the Programming Love podcast, in which we discuss peer-to-peer systems for collaboration, CRDTs and conflict resolution, undo and other challenges of collaboration software, my “Is Kafka a Database?” talk, and more. Recorded 9 July 2020, published 19 October 2020. Episode link, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher.

  • Interview with CSR (Computer Science Research) Tales, in which we discuss formally proving the correctness of distributed systems, and verifying CRDTs in particular. Published 30 July 2019. Transcript.

  • Interview with the Hydra conference on seeing through technology hype, the CAP theorem, decentralisation, proving the correctness of CRDTs, event-based systems, and personal growth. Recorded 3 June 2019, published 27 June 2019. Transcript.

  • Interview with the Code Podcast, in which we talked in depth about my research on CRDTs, what they can and cannot do, and how we deal with time in distributed systems. Recorded 4 September 2018. Not sure this episode ever got published.

  • Interview for an internal podcast at Booz Allen Hamilton. Recorded 9 April 2018. I don’t think it ever got made publicly available.

  • Interview with the Invested Investor podcast, in which we talked about my startup career before I got into academia, selling two companies, going through Y Combinator, moving to Silicon Valley, and all that jazz. Recorded 20 November 2017, published 24 January 2018. Episode link, Audioboom, Transcript.

  • First interview with Software Engineering Daily, in which we talk about data-intensive applications, the CAP theorem, scalability, data models, data formats, the challenges of distributed systems, and ideas for the future. Recorded 20 April 2017, published 2 May 2017. I am told that this was the most popular episode ever of this podcast! Episode link, Download, Transcript.

  • Second interview with Software Engineering Daily, in which we talk about decentralisation, CRDTs, blockchains, consensus, concurrency, and how to make CRDTs work in practice. Recorded 15 November 2017, published 8 December 2017. Episode link, Download, Transcript.

  • Interview with Advance Tech Podcast, in which we discuss a wide range of topics: my past life in startups, security and decentralisation, event streaming systems, data consistency, and formal verification. Recorded and published 27 October 2017. Episode link.

  • Interview with InfoQ about log-based messaging, stream processing, and change data capture. Recorded 24 April 2015, published 28 June 2015. Video and transcript.

Update — later additions: