Pranav Shukla is the founder and CEO of Valens DataLabs, a technologist, husband, and father of two. He is a big data architect and software craftsman who uses JVM-based languages. Pranav has diverse experience of over 14 years in architecting enterprise applications for Fortune 500 companies and start-ups. His core expertise lies in building JVM-based, scalable, reactive, and data-driven applications using Java/Scala, the Hadoop ecosystem, Apache Spark, and NoSQL databases. He is a big data engineering, analytics, and machine learning enthusiast.
Pranav founded Valens DataLabs with a vision to help companies leverage data to their competitive advantage. Valens DataLabs specializes in developing next-generation, cloud-based, reactive, and data-intensive applications using big data and web technologies. The company believes in agile practices, lean principles, test-driven and behavior-driven development, continuous integration, and continuous delivery for sustainable software systems.
In his free time, he enjoys reading books, playing musical instruments, singing, listening to music, and watching cricket. You can reach him via email at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @pranavshukla81.
I would like to thank my wife Kruti Shukla for her unconditional love and support, our sons Sauhadra and Pratishth, my parents Dr Sharad Shukla and Varsha Shukla. I would like to thank my brother Vishal Shukla for playing an inspirational role in my career and also for inspiring me to write this book. I would like to thank Parth Mistry, Gopal Ghanghar, and Krishna Meet for their valuable feedback for the book. I am grateful to many who have contributed in shaping my career through fruitful interactions, particularly I would like to thank Umesh Kakkad, Eddie Moojen, Wart Fransen, Praveen Sameneni, Vinod Patel, Gopal Shah, and Sachin Bakshi.
Sharath Kumar M N has done his masters in Computer Science at The University of Texas, Dallas, USA. He has been in the IT industry for more than ten years now and is the Elasticsearch Solutions Architect at Oracle. He is an Elastic Stack advocate, and being an avid speaker he has also given several tech talks in conferences such as the Oracle Code Event. Sharath is a certified trainer—Elastic Certified Instructor—one of the few technology experts in the world who has been certified by Elastic Inc to deliver their official from the creators of Elastic training. He is also a data science and machine learning enthusiast.
In his free time, he enjoys trekking, listening to music, playing with his lovely pets Guddu and Milo and the geek in him loves exploring his Python skills for stock market analysis. You can reach him via email at [email protected].
I would like to thank my parents, Geetha and Nanjaiah, sister Dr Shilpa M N, brother-in-law Dr Sridhar and my friends - without their support I wouldn't have been able to finish my part of this book in time. I would also like to thank Packt Publishing team(specially Cheryl, Samuel, Varsha, Sagar) for providing a great opportunity for me to take part in this exciting journey.