Dosa with Venkat Subramaniam
As we entered the hotel, few heads turned towards us and I couldn’t help but notice the eyebrows, raising immediately, as though to say “whoa! it’s Venkat!”. Not one engineer would have gone without learning from Venkat’s numerous talks on Java 8, Lambdas, Rx, Design Patterns .. and the list goes on. I am one of them. Every time I am unsure of how something works or what something means, Venkat’s numerous talks and Agile Learner is my first point of reference.
I was blessed with an occasion last year to meet Venkat 1×1. What follows is the summary of my learnings from the conversation.

Developer Aging
Being an engineer in mid-thirties, I always have this feeling of aging, the concern to be on top of new technology that comes our way and to stay sharp. When I shared these concerns to Venkat, he said “It’s all in flexing the mental muscle. It’s all in the mind. “.
He shared some key tips to not let age interfere with what we want to do.
- Flex the mental Muscle — Just like it requires regular workout to keep and develop physical muscles, mental muscles are also built by “working out” regularly. Some of the things that we can do to work out are
- Spend 15 min a day reading/ learning.
- Do some daily exercise like Kata. CodeKata– is one such good option
- We could also do competitive coding like top-coder, hackerrank etc
- Taking care of health — Staying healthy physically goes a long way in making sure we feel energetic and young. Some of the tips Venkat shared on keeping good health were
- To be regular with Annual Health check-ups and being regular with medications when necessary
- Staying active — walking, taking stairs whenever possible
- Sleeping well- A good night’s sleep to keep us energized during the day. Venkat, however, said he avoids taking naps mid-day to sleep well at night
- Building a habit of waking up at the same time every day goes a long way in tuning our body for the day’s work
Being on top of technology
My next question to Venkat was on how we can keep up with emerging technology. As developers, we always are in a catch-up mode. How do we stay on speed on what to be learning to move the compass from being a reactive follower to a proactive thought leader?
Venkat said that we can visualize it as a pyramid( depicted below). The top is “what we know” which is thin, the middle is “what we know we don’t know“. The bottom is “what we don’t know we don’t know“.

“What we know” is always the smallest. We should strive to thin the bottom layer, i.e to move from “ We don’t know, we don’t know “ to “ We know, we don’t know”. If we know what we don’t know, it is usually easier to learn it.
Venkat emphasized that the daily read of 15 min as mentioned above will help us in moving from the bottom section to the middle ( or middle to top), which will enable us to learn on a need basis. The thinner we make the bottom section the better we are.
One way to learn what we don’t know is to go to all the major conferences. We don’t need to pay and go physically( It is great if we could) but the websites of all the major conferences. Check out the talks at these conferences. The most number of talks on specific topics gives the field/subject where the industry is moving.
How to learn, now that we know what to learn?
In software, there are three dimensions to anything we want to learn.
The three facets

- The Field — It could be the broader area where the topic falls into for- eg Database
- The Concept — The actual idea, the crux or principles of what we need to learn — eg NoSQL
- The Provider/vendor/implementor — Learning hands on the specific implementation- eg Mongo, Cassandra etc
The best way to learn is to learn one concept and one implementation, we could always use the learnings of the concept to learn other implementations.
If we want to go deep in any particular concept, the best way to learn, Venkat believes is to read books. Again, buying too many books could be expensive. We could volunteer to review a book to read the book and learn first hand.
My next question to Venkat was about managing time as an engineer
Time management
Venkat reiterated that it’s all in the mind. He said the mind is a beautiful thing and it can be taught to work our ways. For example, if we have something to do and if we procrastinate, we train the mind that it’s ok to procrastinate and hence we follow suit for other stuff we have planned. Procrastination hence becomes a habit. If we take it small and do little by little we train the mind we can be organized and we can stick to the time
Schedule all the things to be done in mind.
Venkat makes note of everything he intends to do in his reminders and makes it a point to review and schedule them. He mentioned we do not need a fancy app to do that, simple iPhone reminders do their job perfectly for him.
There are many times begging to be scheduled, like a long flight, waiting for trains etc
- Pre-planning for what to do during these slots will get us working better
- Setting timers and alarms to remind us of the completed time helps us stay on schedule.
Waking up earlier than the world gives a bunch of undisturbed time that could be used for deep work
Working on a standing desk not only keeps us more focused but also is good for our back.
Unspoken learnings
Well, these were all the things that I could learn from Venkat from my conversation. There were other learnings by just observing the man himself. They were
- Humility– Venkat was very polite, humble and calm.
- Punctual– When Venkat said he will meet me at 5.45 pm, he meant 5.45. He didn’t make me wait to pick him. He was ready waiting for me when I went to pick him up from the hotel.
- Focused– Venkat, as we all know, is a very busy man. He will have a lot of reasons to check his emails, check messages, tweets etc. But during my 3-hour conversation not once did he glanced at his phone.
- Awareness– Though he did not look at his phone or watch, Venkat was well aware of the time and the environment. In fact, by the time we left the restaurant, it had been well past their closing time. Venkat enquired their closing time and instantly apologized when we realized we made them keep the restaurant open longer.
Overall it was a great experience and a very blessed evening for me. The evening changed me for good. Hopefully, it does for you too.
Migrated from my originally published blog at www.programmingartistry.com on August 28, 2017.