Data Engineering Central Podcast

Long Live the Data Engineer. No holds barred. Talking about Data Engineering news, topics, and general mayhem. dataengineeringcentral.substack.com

Data Engineering Central Podcast is a technology podcast hosted by Data Engineering in Real Life, with 38 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Data Engineering in Real Life hosts Data Engineering Central Podcast, a technology show with 38 episodes published.

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  Data Engineering Central Podcast

  How Real Data Engineers Think (Beyond Tools and Hype)

  Jun 3, 202649 minS0

  <p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>We spend a lot of time digging into what actually matters in modern data engi...

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  Data Engineering Central Podcast

  Data, AI, and DuckDB

  May 27, 202650 minS0

  <p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p...

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  Data Engineering Central Podcast

  Why I Left Facebook to Work for Myself

  May 20, 202653 minS0

  <p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>And yeah, it wasn’t all glamorous.</p><p>“I was making the same money as Facebook… and I hated my life.”</p><p>We get into the stuff most people don’t talk about:</p><p>* What it’s a...

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  Data Engineering Central Podcast

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

  May 13, 202656 minS0

  <p>Most companies don’t have a tooling problem. They have a foundation problem.</p><p>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.</p><p>* 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 anal...

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  Data Engineering Central Podcast

  AI Isn’t Replacing Curious Developers

  May 6, 20261h 4mS0

  <p>AI isn’t just changing how we write code. It’s changing what it even means to build software.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>* We talk...

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