The organizers of GR8 in the US conference, Bill Turner and Shaun Jurgemeyer, announced today that Venkat Subramaniam has been named the conference kickoff speaker.

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc. has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. He helps his clients succeed with Agile Development and various software technologies. He is a frequent invited speaker at various international software conferences. He's author of .NET Gotchas (O'Reilly), co-author of the 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning book Practices of an Agile Developer, and author of Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer and Programming Scala (all from Pragmatic Bookshelf).

GR8 in the US is a one day conference dedicated to the software language Groovy, software development frameworks Grails and Griffon, and related technology. It will be held April 16th, 2010 at the Holiday Inn Bloomington I-35W, 1201 West 94th Street, Bloomington, MN 55431.