THE SPEAKERS

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., creator of agilelearner.com, and an instructional professor at the University of Houston. He has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and is a regularly-invited speaker at several international conferences. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with sustainable agile practices on their software projects. Venkat is a (co)author of multiple technical books, including the 2007 Jolt Productivity award winning book Practices of an Agile Developer. You can find a list of his books at agiledeveloper.com. You can reach him by email at venkats@agiledeveloper.com or on twitter at @venkat_s.

Craig Walls is a Principal Engineer, Java Champion, Alexa Champion, and the author of Spring AI in Action, Spring in Action, and Build Talking Apps. He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring. When he's not slinging code, Craig is planning his next trip to Disney World or Disneyland and spending as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 1 bird and 2 dogs.

Rohit Bhardwaj is a Director of Architecture working at Salesforce. Rohit has extensive experience architecting multi-tenant cloud-native solutions in Resilient Microservices Service-Oriented architectures using AWS Stack. In addition, Rohit has a proven ability in designing solutions and executing and delivering transformational programs that reduce costs and increase efficiencies. As a trusted advisor, leader, and collaborator, Rohit applies problem resolution, analytical, and operational skills to all initiatives and develops strategic requirements and solution analysis through all stages of the project life cycle and product readiness to execution. Rohit excels in designing scalable cloud microservice architectures using Spring Boot and Netflix OSS technologies using AWS and Google clouds. As a Security Ninja, Rohit looks for ways to resolve application security vulnerabilities using ethical hacking and threat modeling. Rohit is excited about architecting cloud technologies using Dockers, REDIS, NGINX, RightScale, RabbitMQ, Apigee, Azul Zing, Actuate BIRT reporting, Chef, Splunk, Rest-Assured, SoapUI, Dynatrace, and EnterpriseDB. In addition, Rohit has developed lambda architecture solutions using Apache Spark, Cassandra, and Camel for real-time analytics and integration projects. Rohit has done MBA from Babson College in Corporate Entrepreneurship, Masters in Computer Science from Boston University and Harvard University. Rohit is a regular speaker at No Fluff Just Stuff, UberConf, RichWeb, GIDS, and other international conferences. Rohit loves to connect on http://www.productivecloudinnovation.com. http://linkedin.com/in/rohit-bhardwaj-cloud or using Twitter at rbhardwaj1.

My passion is taking a metaphysical approach to software engineering: **what is the nature of the collaborative game that we continuously play, and are there better, more contextually-aware ways to play that game?** By day I lead a team tasked with taking **a first-principles-centric approach to intentionally enabling programming language usage** at the largest bank in the United States. By night I write and teach my way through **a masterclass in software engineering and architecture targeting early-career software engineers working in large-scale enterprise technology organizations**. ## What is the primary goal? To win the game. More seriously: **to get 1% better every day at providing business value through software.** ## Who am I? I'm a 22-year veteran of the enterprise software industry. I've played almost every role I can imagine: - Software Engineer - Software Architect - Technical Lead - Engineering Manager - Consultant - Product Manager - Field CTO - Developer Advocate - Conference Speaker - Author - Technical Trainer - Technical Marketer - Site Reliability Engineer - Desktop Support Specialist I've worked at Fortune 500 companies, a tenacious teal cloud startup, and a not-for-profit children's hospital. I've written a book, and I've hosted a podcast. I've learned a lot along the way, including many things I wish I'd known when I first got started. And so now I want to pass those learnings on to you, especially if you've only just begun your career.

Dave is a senior architect for Thomson Reuters and has worked for Thomson Reuters for over 20 years where his focus is on architecting and delivering enterprise hybrid big data systems.

Dave has written two books with Addison-Wesley, and is currently working on a third:

• 12 Essential Skills for Software Architects – this book focuses on the soft skills needed by software architects, and has also been translated to Chinese.
• 12 More Essential Skills for Software Architects – this book focuses on the day to day technical skills needed by software architects.
• (In Progress) Enterprise Big Data – this book focuses on how to architect and build enterprise big data systems.



Dave is also the head coach for the Eagan High School FIRST Robotics program with over 150 students and over 60 mentors. Dave also likes to build things like trebuchets, go carts, and rain barrel watering systems.