Martin Kleppmann

sizable database, but it was still like a single instance database and not really that big in the grand scheme of things.

And then suddenly I was at LinkedIn and, oh, we got to get to use their big Hadoop cluster.

That was fun, like hand-coding MapReduce jobs in Java at the time.

And so I learned a huge amount there, especially when the stream processing ideas came up and Jay was evangelizing the use of Kafka and the things you could do with it.

That was kind of a revelation for me, really, where I suddenly felt, ah, this kind of makes sense.

I start to understand how these various data systems fit together, what they have in common, what the fundamental principles are.

And so that experience then fed directly into the writing of the book.

Yeah, so first I decided to move back to the UK, actually, and I continued working for LinkedIn remotely.

That was mostly because my girlfriend at the time, now wife, was still in the UK, and a long-distance relationship is not a lot of fun.

And I didn't feel that at home in the Bay Area, so I wasn't really encouraging her to move to the Bay Area either.

I thought it was better for me to go back to Europe, and I'm very happy with that decision.

I still have a lot of great friends in the Bay Area.

I love it as a place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live here, honestly.

Then I was still remotely working for LinkedIn and that worked all right for a while.

When I then started writing the book, LinkedIn even gave me 50% of my time free to work on my book alongside my software engineering duties, which is really great.

Amazing.

Yeah.

That is so nice of them.

Absolutely.

And they don't have to do that.