Venkat Subramaniam: I Teach Because I Learn

Duke's Corner

Jim Grisanzio from Java Developer Relations talks with Venkat Subramaniam who was recognized with the Java Community Lifetime Achievement honors by Oracle’s Sharat Chander at Devoxx UK in May 2024. Venkat is a Java Champion, author, speaker, founder of Agile Developer, co-founder of the dev2next conference, and teacher at the University of Houston.

In this conversation, which is part of an ongoing series honoring Java pioneers, Venkat expresses profound humility about his accomplishments and credits industry giants and his passion for learning and sharing technical knowledge. He reflects on leaving his own company years ago to focus on teaching and technology, writing books like Cruising Along with Java, and speaking at over 45 conferences and 30 Java User Groups — every single year! Venkat has one of the most impressive global speaking schedules of anyone in the Java community.

Venkat praises Java User Group leaders as “unsung heroes” for their organizational efforts and highlights Java 25’s evolving features like structured concurrency, scoped values, pattern matching, and the instance main method, which helps simplify the learning process for new developers. Venkat also cites Java’s agile six-month release cycle, which helps improve the smooth evolution of Java, increases developer engagement, and makes Java more suitable for today’s rapidly expanding technology markets.

Emphasizing teaching as reciprocal learning, Venkat advises students to engage mentors and senior developers to collaborate with juniors to help welcome into the community. He stresses that knowledge grows when shared. His mantra? Teaching fuels learning and he lives that ethic every day as he interacts with thousands of developers around the world.

Venkat Subramaniam https://x.com/venkat_s

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Jim Grisanzio https://x.com/jimgris