What's it like being a distributed systems engineer? Apurva Mehta (Engineering Leader, Confluent) explains what attracted him to Apache Kafka®, the challenges and uniqueness of distributed systems, and how to excel in this industry. 

He dives into the complex math behind the temporal logic of actions (TLA) and shares about his experiences working at Yahoo and Linkedin, which have prepared him to be where he is today.

Apurva also shares what he looks for when hiring someone to join his team. When you're working on a system like Kafka and Kafka Streams, really understanding what your machine is doing, where the bottlenecks are, and how to design improvements to address inefficiencies is critical. 

EPISODE LINKS

• Jason Gufstason discusses TLA validation (and distributed systems engineering in general) 
• MIT Courseware on Distributed Systems 
• Join the Confluent Community Slack
• Learn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent Developer
• Live demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent Cloud
• Use 60PDCAST to get an additional $60 of free Confluent Cloud usage (details)