Abstract, Isolate, Interface & Automate with Dr Pramod Varma

In this episode,Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting is in conversation with Dr. Pramod Varma, CTO of EkStep and Chief architect of Aadhaar, where Pramod talks about

• His early school years studying in his mother tongue, Malayalam
• Getting into Applied mathematics for higher studies
• Joining Infosys and learning to address the challenges of teaching academically high performers
• His experience in using some of the earliest technology components of the internet
• How his research and teaching led him to conceptual thinking and architectural thinking, through a non-linear learning approach for himself
• HOw he developed the skills to communicate the big vision to individual contributors too - by thinking and working in a startup mode
• His principles to Abstract, Isolate and define interfaces first
• Making sure the interface and automation are sollid
• Building for refactorability
• Importance of understanding the why behind the why behind the why
• Design for a decade, implement for today
• His idea of coming up with an addressable recipient for payment
• His thoughts on Chief architect or design by committee model
• His four tips for an aspiring architect

Dr. Pramod Varma is the CTO of EkStep, a not-for-profit creating learner-centric, technology enabled platform aiming to provide learning opportunities to 200 million children in India. In addition, he continues to be the Chief Architect of Aadhaar, India's digital identity program that has successfully covered more than 1.2 billion people in a short span of 7 years. He is also the architect of various India Stack layers such as eSign, Digital Locker, and Unified Payment Interface (UPI) all of which are now working at population scale in India. He has, along with Nandan Nilekani, co-founded beckn.org a non-profit creating open source protocol specifications for hyperlocal commerce.

He is an advisor to Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), National Payment Corporation (NPCI), Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN), National Health Authority (NHA), Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), and helps with many digital public infrastructure initiatives. He regularly speaks at technology conferences

and is part of advisory groups of various national projects from time to time.

Before joining UIDAI in July 2009, he was the Chief Technology Architect and Vice President of Research at Sterling Commerce, now part of IBM. He joined Sterling in 2005 when Sterling Commerce acquired Yantra Corporation, a leading supply chain software company based in Boston, USA. At Yantra Corporation he has been anchoring all technology and architecture strategies and has been key part in building Yantra’s founding team. He began his career as part of the research team at Infosys Technologies and has been part of team that built an Internet banking module and a powerful web application server as early as 1995.

Over the past 25+ years, he has studied architectures spanning from mainframes to web and has worked extensively with most programming languages, platforms, and databases. He has researched and taught various courses in Database Tuning, Distributed Computing, Internet Technologies, and Computer Architectures among others.

Pramod holds a Master’s and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science along with a second Master’s in Applied Mathematics. His interests include Internet scale distributed architectures and intelligent systems. He is passionate about technology, science, society, and teaching.

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