Field CTO Archives - Kai Waehner

My Data Streaming Journey with Kafka and Flink - 7 Years at Confluent

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11 minute read

My Data Streaming Journey with Kafka & Flink: 7 Years at Confluent

ByKai Waehner
3. May 2024
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Time flies… I joined Confluent seven years ago when Apache Kafka was mainly used by a few tech giants and the company had ~100 employees. This blog post explores my data streaming journey, including Kafka becoming a de facto standard for over 100,000 organizations, Confluent doing an IPO on the NASDAQ stock exchange, 5000+ customers adopting a data streaming platform, and emerging new design approaches and technologies like data mesh, GenAI, and Apache Flink. I look at the past, present and future of my personal data streaming journey. Both, from the evolution of technology trends and the journey as a Confluent employee that started in a Silicon Valley startup and is now part of a global software and cloud company.

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24 minute read

The Daily Life of a Field CTO

ByKai Waehner
9. January 2023
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Field CTO is a job role that comes up more and more in software companies. There is no standard definition for this job role. As I regularly get the question about what a Field CTO does, this blog post summarizes a few general characteristics and then explores my daily life as a Field CTO. The post concludes with the answer to how you can also become a Field CTO at a software company in your career.