About Tim Berglund
I am a developer relations leader, speaker, and writer focused on streaming data and AI for developers. I'm passionate about helping my fellow developers adopt and succeed with the technologies that are most impacting their lives, and building DevRel teams that tie developer success to business impact.
Background
I began my my career as a developer writing embedded firmware in the early 1990s, when in-circuit emulators were rare commodities that the intern couldn't touch. With crackerjack timing, I pivoted from firmware to the web just as the dotcom bubble was popping, learning early versions of the Java web stack and finding out that databases weren't just for programmers who couldn't hack it in the real world of hardware. (Yes, twenty-something me belived that at one point.)
After a decade of what we would end up calling full-stack Java web development at a startup and later as an independent consultant, I would eventually discover that I really loved training and conference speaking, and I got good results at both. Nobody really said "Developer Relations" back then, but when I joined GitHub in the middle of 2012, that's exactly what I and my peers on the training team were doing. A few years later, at DataStax, I would develop a crisper vision of what Developer Relations ought to be and how it should be structured to support an infrastructure business.
I got to build out some of that vision at Confluent in the late 2010s, and created video training content and a pubic speaking presence that would help hundreds of thousands of developers worldwide come up to speed with an era-defining disruptive technology: Apache Kafka®. In the mid-2020s at StarTree and then back at Confluent, I had the opportunity to close the loop on approach to DevRel that was tied clearly to go-to-market success.
Through Git, distributed databases, Kafka, event-driven architecture, and real-time analytics, my career has gravitated towards the frontier technologies that have imposed increasing demands on developers' skills and even their anxiety about their ability to adapt to changing paradigms. Now, as AI provides us with powers we've only been able to dream of, at the same time as it seems to some to threaten us with obsolescence, I'm committed to continuing to help my fellow developers adopt and succeed with the technologies on the leading edge of their profession.
Selected essays
Talks and videos
You can find a selection of some of my video work here.