Hari Krishnan
Polyglot Full Stack Developer and Architecture Consultant, Lean and XP Coach
Bengaluru, India
Actions
Hari Krishnan has over two decades of experience in building high-performing teams, designing scalable systems, and driving technical strategy for large enterprises and high-growth startups across industries like finance, telecom, logistics, and retail. As Founder and CEO of Polarizer Technologies he has led enterprise-wide initiatives in architecture, developer experience, test automation and AI adoption. He combines deep technical expertise with executive vision, having worked closely with CXOs on strategy, delivery assurance, and organizational agility. He is widely recognized for his contributions to API governance, platform engineering, and contract-driven development.
He has spoken at several premier international conferences, actively contributes to several open-source projects. His areas of interest include distributed systems, AI native products, AI augmented and agentic software delivery.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Supercharging Spec-Driven Development for Event-Driven Architectures with AsyncAPI
Spec-Driven Development (SDD) has been steadily gaining traction (popilarised by Kiro, GitHub Spec Kit, etc.) for its ability to articulate and break down a feature into well-thought-through, detailed tasks for AI coding agents to implement.
When building Event-Driven Architectures (EDA) using SDD, the process can be hindered by the ambiguity of plain-language markdown and the absence of a concrete system representation. This is where the AsyncAPI specification becomes a powerful companion.
AsyncAPI brings precision and structure to what would otherwise remain loosely defined. It allows teams to externalise their intent into a clear, machine-readable design artifact that describes channels, messages, and bindings. This effectively clarifies the architecture before implementation begins. The result is a system design that is both reviewable by humans and directly usable by AI coding agents as a source of truth for building out the implementation.
If you are interested in learning how a pragmatic approach to Spec-Driven Development can be applied to building event-driven systems (without the hype), and with AsyncAPI as the bridge between design intent and working code, this session will offer a concise, experience-based walkthrough.
Spec-Driven Development: A Pragmatic Look
Spec-Driven Development (SDD) has quickly moved from being an experimental workflow to something many teams are now exploring seriously. The idea of expressing intent through a specification and letting tools and agents use that to plan, generate, and validate work sounds appealing, but fitting it into the realities of day-to-day engineering is a different story.
In this talk, we’ll take a grounded look at how SDD can coexist with the messy realities of modern software teams. Where do features live? In your project board, or inside the codebase? What if you do not have a monorepo? How do you balance evolving specs with distributed ownership and asynchronous delivery? In fact a more fundamental question being what is even a spec and the mixed use of jargon like PRD.
Drawing on examples from my work and the broader Spec-Driven ecosystem (OpenSpec, Spec-Kit, and similar tooling), we will explore what is working, where it is met with friction, and where SDD actually adds value. This is not a tutorial or a pitch for the approach itself. It is an attempt to map the principles of SDD onto the practical rhythms of product engineering, design, and AI-assisted implementation.
If you have been curious about SDD but unsure how it fits into your team’s structure, this session will give you a realistic lens to evaluate and adopt it at your own pace.
Learning Outcomes
1. Is SDD only for Greenfield? or does it work for Brownfield and if yes how?
2. Understanding the ecosystem, tooling and their philosophy to categorise and chose one that aligns with your thought process
3. What Spec-Driven Development looks like in practice - across different team and code repo structures.
4. How big should a feature be for SDD? What limits can you hit?
5. Avoiding token drain generating Markdown Mountains
6. What SDD does not replace? and the basic skills that help extract the most out of SDD
DeveloperWeek 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
API Days India
AsyncAPI 2.6 to 3.0: Migrating Safely with No-Code Backward Compatibility Checks
GOTO Serverless
Reliable AWS Lambda Data Pipelines with AsyncAPI Specification
https://conferences.gotopia.tech/goto-serverless-bengaluru-2025/sessions/3845/reliable-aws-lambda-data-pipelines-with-asyncapi-specification
Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3McRayR31D4
APIDays New York
Using GraphQL SDL Files as Executable API Contracts - https://speakerdeck.com/harikrishnan83/using-graphql-sdl-files-as-executable-api-contracts
Unifying OpenAPI & AsyncAPI: Designing JSON Schemas + Examples for Reuse - https://speakerdeck.com/harikrishnan83/unifying-openapi-and-asyncapi-designing-json-schemas-plus-examples-for-reuse
Agile India 2025
API Design Anti-patterns: How to identify & avoid them - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1Di4RyyG4w
DeveloperWeek 2025 Sessionize Event
Functional Conf 2025
The Functional Fix: Kotlin Error Handling Made Elegant - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byIcRxtk6gA
APIDays Paris
Contract-Driven Development for Event-Driven Architectures (https://conference.asyncapi.com/venue/Paris)
Slides - https://speakerdeck.com/harikrishnan83/contract-driven-development-for-event-driven-architectures
AsyncAPI Online Conference Edition
Using API spec as an Executable Contract To Mock and Test Microservices
Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiM20HTCerM
Slides - https://speakerdeck.com/harikrishnan83/asyncapi-as-executable-contracts
AsyncAPI Conf On Tour 2023
Kafka and JMS Mocking with AsyncAPI using Specmatic
Video - https://youtu.be/9yRf75p_kTU?si=iR4lV_HLaVlUKsrY
AsyncAPI allows us to articulate communication channels between services clearly. What if I told you that this AsyncAPI specification is all it takes for us to quickly spin up mock topics and queues to test our services in isolation?
That is exactly what Specmatic is able to achieve by leveraging AsyncAPI specifications to give us early feedback on our local machines and in our CI pipelines when our service implementations deviate from the API specifications.
In this talk, I will be going over below points in detail:
1. Ability to detect deviation in implementation at a protocol, schema and more during early stages of development to shift left the identification of potential integration issues.
2. Leveraging AsyncAPI specifications to collaborate between teams to develop and deploy microservices in parallel with confidence.
3. How this ability fits into the overall concept of Contract Driven Development.
API World 2022 Sessionize Event
API Specifications Conference 2022
Turn Your OpenAPI Specifications into Executable Contracts
Event - https://sched.co/15pVN
Video - https://youtu.be/U5Agz-mvYIU?si=IbXcmiqrhuYOSLcU
Selenium Conf 2022
Contract Driven Development - Deploying your MicroServices independently without integration testing
TestingUy 2021 Sessionize Event
Agile 2021
Abstract / Teaser - https://vimeo.com/551960536
Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaKhBS-_4p4
Hari Krishnan
Polyglot Full Stack Developer and Architecture Consultant, Lean and XP Coach
Bengaluru, India
Actions
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top