Confluent Developer ft. Tim Berglund, Adi Polak & Viktor Gamov Building Real-time Systems for Apple, Nike & more ft. Adi Polak | Ep. 1
Sep 22, 2025
Adi Polak, a developer relations leader at Confluent, shares her fascinating journey from dog walker to building large-scale analytics at Akamai. She discusses the challenges of optimizing real-time threat detection and how collaboration shaped her career. Learn about the key innovations in analytics for identifying DDoS attacks and the importance of empathy and trust in engineering success. Adi emphasizes the significance of long-term investments in developing robust analytics platforms.
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Early Lessons From Dog Walking
- Adi Polak's first job was walking dogs for elderly neighbors starting around age eight.
- She used the job to learn responsibility and to connect with customers over tea conversations.
CDN Data As The World's Networking Mirror
- CDN traffic is a rich source of global networking data for analytics and security.
- Building analytics on top of that data creates trust and visibility for customers.
Building Analytics At Akamai Scale
- Adi worked at Akamai during early Hadoop days, building analytics for both external customers and internal data scientists.
- Customers included big companies like Nike, Apple, and early Facebook who needed CDN analytics at scale.