Kenneth Kousen
ÜberConf
Denver · June 24 - 27, 2014
President, Kousen IT, Inc.
Ken Kousen is a Java Champion, several time JavaOne Rock Star, and a Grails Rock Star. He is the author of the Pragmatic Library books “Mockito Made Clear” and “Help Your Boss Help You,” the O'Reilly books “Kotlin Cookbook”, “Modern Java Recipes”, and “Gradle Recipes for Android”, and the Manning book “Making Java Groovy”. He also has recorded over a dozen video courses for the O'Reilly Learning Platform, covering topics related to Android, Spring, Java, Groovy, Grails, and Gradle.
His academic background include BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics from M.I.T., an MA and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I. He is currently President of Kousen IT, Inc., based in Connecticut.
Presentations
Groovy for Java Developers
Learn Groovy from a Java developer's perspective. Use Groovy features like native collections, operator overloading, and the Groovy JDK. Additional topics will include closures, builders, AST transformations, and basic metaprogramming.
Grails Workshop
Build a Grails application from start to finish in this half-day workshop. We'll start with domain classes, apply constraints, add controllers and services, apply both unit and integration tests, and then add additional functionality through plugins.
Grails Workshop
Build a Grails application from start to finish in this half-day workshop. We'll start with domain classes, apply constraints, add controllers and services, apply both unit and integration tests, and then add additional functionality through plugins.
Making Java Groovy
Groovy isn't designed to replace Java – it just makes Java cleaner and easier to develop. This presentation will look at various tasks Java developers need to do and demonstrate ways Groovy can help.
Groovy Tips and Tricks
Groovy has a very easy learning curve for Java developers, so many people become Groovy users without realizing all it can do. This presentation will examine features of Groovy that can make your life easier once you're past the initial adoption stage.
Bayes' Rule Says You'll Attend This Talk
Statistics is hot lately, due in part to the easy availability of large data sets and the successes of people like Nate Silver. These aren't your father's statistics, however. A quiet revolution has swept through the field, shifting it from traditional frequentist methods toward a more Bayesian approach. This talk will discuss Bayes' Theorem and show you how to do simple, back-of-the-envelope calculations to apply it to a wide variety of problems.
Beyond Managing Your Manager
This is a revised and updated version of the previous talk, with current thinking from practice and the literature. The talk presents why conflicts with your manager are inevitable based on differences in priorities and perspectives, and how to plan for them. The goal is to show you how to build the loyalty relationship that allows you to get what you need when you need it.
Groovy Vampires: Combining Groovy, REST, NoSQL, and more
If a book as horrible as Twilight can sell millions of copies and be made into an even worse movie, how many copies can a book with Groovy vampires sell? (Spoiler: Not as many.) Yes, this topic may be silly, but the technologies used (Groovy, Ratpack, MongoDB, Grails, REST) are (un)deadly serious.