Venkat Subramaniam: I Teach Because I Learn
From Duke's Corner by Jim Grisanzio
September 5, 2025 · 41 min
About this episode
Jim Grisanzio interviews Venkat Subramaniam about his journey in the Java community and the importance of teaching and learning.
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…
People in this episode
Host: Jim Grisanzio
Guest: Venkat Subramaniam
Topics covered
- Java
- teaching
- technology
- community
- software development
Keywords
- Java Champion
- Agile Developer
- Devoxx UK
- Java User Groups
- structured concurrency
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Oracle, Agile Developer, dev2next conference, University of Houston
Books & works: Cruising Along with Java
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