Hi there! I am Praveen.
Cloud Architect, Technology Speaker, CTO @Egen.AI
I joined Egen.AI in the fall of 2012 as a Software Engineer. Over the years, I grew from being an individual contributor on a client project to building the Egen Engineering (aka EGENeering) organization from null. During this period, I have seen us growing from one engineer to an amazing team of 400+ engineers, architects, and product owners spread across our multiple projects and geographies. Alongside these teams, I have worked with our enterprise and startup clients in the fields of Industrial IoT, Retail, Food/Grocery Delivery, Healthcare, Executive Coaching, and Event Management. One personal trait that I have been able to inject in these teams is an obsession with constant learning and experimentation. My teams are working with the top three Cloud Providers, major programming stacks, and modern data and app architectures while following Cloud Native Engineering Principles. The approaches we have taken to solve complex problems are nothing short of amazing. These are the experiences I love to bring into my technology speaking.
As a Cloud Architect, I advise our clients on implementing event-driven platforms and cloud-native app and data architectures built on top of first-class automation of cloud services. Being involved hands-on with both enterprises and small startups simultaneously, I understand the importance of architectures and processes that work for one but not the other. Startups' projects allow me to experiment with new ideas and gain confidence to then use those at an enterprise level; a breath of fresh air. On the reverse, the complexities and scale of the enterprise problems help me identify and address potential blind spots for startups ahead of time. Win-win for everyone. On many instances, I have started a project with hiring, mentoring, and leading a small team of EGENeers and then scaled it to 10+ teams developing a distributed platform. A few times, I screwed up and now I proudly call those as lessons learned; another element of my technology speaking.
I was born in 1987 (do the math) in a small district in central India (Ratlam) and lived there for the first 18 years of my life. Have been in love with computers since I was 14 years old. Right after my undergrad studies, I came to the USA in 2010 to study at the University of Florida and graduated with a Master’s in Computer Engineering in 2012. Still miss the Sunshine State weather.
Go Gators 🐊; from the cold winters of Chicago ❄️.
Throughout my academics and career, I have never enjoyed theoretical learning. As an audio-visual learner, all of my learning has come from YouTube videos, podcasts, shows, movies, and hands-on tutorials. Apart from investing my time in technology, I also have a creative passion for vector graphics (logos, colors, fonts, patterns), music, video editing, and experience of Adobe Creative Cloud (Ai, Ps, Xd, Pr). When I mix that creativity with technical architectures, amazing things happen. I am able to deliver high-quality content while talking on complex subjects with the sarcasm of a certain Chandler Bing. RIP Matthew Perry.
Circa 2014, I became overconfident with my storytelling skills and started teaching modern technical stacks, including JavaScript frameworks, Java, Microservices, AWS, Azure, Kafka, Docker, and Kubernetes. 8000+ students so far. These days I host meetups (Chicago Node.js and Cloud Collective), technical webinars, and workshops, both within Egen and for our community and clients. I create content on various platforms including X, YouTube, Medium, LinkedIn, and other EdTech platforms. This site provides a single point of entry to the world through my perspectives.
If you’d like to get hold of me, you can contact me here.
Speaker Bio (in a serious tone)⌗
Praveen is a Cloud Architect and the CTO at Egen.AI, living in Chicagoland. Over the last 10 years, he has been involved “hands-on” on multiple projects developing distributed platforms, microservices, APIs, data pipelines, user-facing apps, and infrastructure automation. He has built and led technical teams in Industrial IoT, Healthcare, and Retail solutions for various startups and enterprises. He has trained more than 8,000 engineers on modern technical stack, including JavaScript frameworks, Java, AWS, Azure, Kafka, Docker, and Kubernetes. In the last few years, he has started public speaking and advising companies on the Cloud-Native architectures.
