From Failure to AWS: What Actually Makes a Great Engineer

More from Data Engineering Central Podcast All episodes →

1. 

   15 Jul 2026 · 48 min

   What Happens When a Software Engineer Builds a Company Alone?

   When people think about starting a software company, they usually imagine raising venture capital, hiring engineers, and growing a team as quickly as possible. Michael Drogalis chose a different path. After helping build technology in the Kafka ecosystem, founding a startup that was ultimately acquired by Confluent, and leading product for stream processing, he walked away from big tech to see if one person could build a serious B2B software company. * The result became ShadowTraffic , a product that helps engineering teams generate realistic production traffic for testing, demos, and…

2. 

   8 Jul 2026 · 1 hr

   The Creator of Pandas on AI, Apache Arrow, and the Future of Software Engineering

   The creator of Pandas and co-creator of Apache Arrow , Wes McKinney , joins the Data Engineering Central Podcast for an in-depth conversation about how modern data engineering came to exist, where AI is taking software development, and why good engineering still matters more than ever. We start with Wes’ journey from building GoldenEye fan websites as a teenager to creating Pandas while working at a quantitative hedge fund, and eventually launching Apache Arrow, one of the foundational technologies behind today’s modern data ecosystem. Along the way, we discuss Cloudera, Parquet, DuckDB,…

3. 

   1 Jul 2026 · 57 min

   From COBOL to Copilot: 30 Years of Data, BI, and AI with David Langer

   What happens when someone who started programming on a Commodore 64 watches AI reshape the entire data industry? In this episode of the Data Engineering Central Podcast, I sit down with Dave Langer to explore nearly three decades of experience across software engineering, business intelligence, analytics, data science, and AI. Dave’s career spans COBOL programming on IBM mainframes, enterprise architecture, Microsoft’s Xbox division, machine learning, startup leadership, authorship, and building one of the largest personal brands in the data space. We discuss why many of the biggest problems…

4. 

   24 Jun 2026 · 45 min

   Semantic Layers, Agents, and the Future of Analytics

   In this episode of the Data Engineering Central Podcast, I sit down with David Jaitillake to explore the future of data engineering, analytics, and AI. David has spent nearly two decades working across data teams, from analyst roles in the early SQL Server days to leading teams, founding startups, serving as VP of AI at Cube, and now co-founding Quarry . We discuss why semantic layers have suddenly become one of the most important concepts in modern data platforms, how tools like Claude Code are transforming engineering workflows, and why the core problems in data haven’t really changed…

5. 

   17 Jun 2026 · 56 min

   The Future of the Lakehouse: Delta Lake, Rust, and Data Platforms at Scale

   In this episode of the Data Engineering Central Podcast, I sit down with Ethan , a maintainer of delta-rs and an expert in modern lakehouse architecture working in the pharmaceutical industry. We discuss Ethan’s journey into tech and data engineering, the evolution of open table formats like Delta Lake and Apache Iceberg, and what it actually takes to build scalable enterprise data platforms in highly regulated environments like big pharma. We also dive into: * delta-rs and the future of Delta Lake outside Spark * Lakehouse architecture and open catalogs * Rust in the modern data ecosystem *…

6. 

   3 Jun 2026 · 49 min

   How Real Data Engineers Think (Beyond Tools and Hype)

   In this episode of the Data Engineering Central Podcast, I sit down with Yordan Ivanov , Head of Data Engineering at a growing fintech company, to talk through what it actually looks like to build and run real data platforms in production. Yordan’s story starts like many of mine, early programming, gaming, PHP, Linux servers—but what makes this conversation interesting is how he evolved from a generalist software engineer into a data engineering leader without even realizing it at first. We spend a lot of time digging into what actually matters in modern data engineering, and it’s not the…

7. 

   27 May 2026 · 50 min

   Data, AI, and DuckDB

   In this episode of the Data Engineering Central Podcast, I sit down with Jacob Matson , Developer Advocate at MotherDuck , to unpack one of the most interesting shifts happening in data engineering right now. Jacob didn’t start in tech the way most people expect. He began in accounting, working with Excel and financial systems, before slowly realizing that the real problem he loved solving wasn’t finance, it was data pipelines. That path eventually led him deep into SQL Server, data warehousing, and ultimately to DuckDB, a tool that fundamentally changed how he thought about processing data.…

8. 

   20 May 2026 · 53 min

   Why I Left Facebook to Work for Myself

   In this episode of the Data Engineering Central Podcast, I sit down with Ben Rogojan to talk about the real story behind data engineering careers, Big Tech, and what’s changing right now. Ben shares how he went from working in kitchens… to data engineering… to Facebook… and eventually walking away from it all to build his own consulting business. And yeah, it wasn’t all glamorous. “I was making the same money as Facebook… and I hated my life.” We get into the stuff most people don’t talk about: * What it’s actually like working in Big Tech * Why high-paying jobs can still burn you out * How…

9. 

   13 May 2026 · 56 min

   Academic → CTO: What Actually Matters in Data (Matthew Housley)

   Most companies don’t have a tooling problem. They have a foundation problem. In this episode, I sit down with Matthew Housley , a famed co-author of Data Engineering Fundamentals and former CTO of Ternary Data, to talk about what actually makes data teams successful and why so many organizations get it wrong despite having modern stacks, cloud platforms, and expensive dashboards. * Matthew’s path is a little different than most. He started in academia as a mathematics instructor before moving into industry as a data scientist at Overstock.com, and eventually leading data strategy and…

10. 

    6 May 2026 · 1 hr 4 min

    AI Isn’t Replacing Curious Developers

    AI isn’t just changing how we write code. It’s changing what it even means to build software. In this episode of the Data Engineering Central Podcast, I sit down with Neil Roberts — a developer who’s been through every major wave of the web, from BASIC on an Atari to modern TypeScript, and now deep into LLMs and agentic workflows. This is not another surface-level “AI will change everything” conversation. We get into what is actually happening right now, where it works, where it completely breaks, and what developers are getting wrong. * We talk about why front-end and UX matter more than…