Kenneth Kousen
Lone Star Software Symposium: Dallas
Dallas · May 20 - 22, 2016

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
Functional Java, Part 1
Understand Java from a functional programming point of view. This part covers the basics of lambdas and streams, emphasizing functional programming by transforming collections using the stream approach.
Functional Java, Part 2
Functional features in Java, including parallel streams, the java.util.function package, the Optional data type, and reduction operations.
Refactoring to Java 8
Java SE 8 introduces many new features that can simplify your code. Using streams, lambdas, and the new Optional type all change the way we write Java. In this presentation, we'll work through a series of examples that show how to rewrite existing code from Java 7 or earlier using the new Java 8 approach.
Groovy: Making Java Better
Groovy is unusual among programming languages in that it doesn't seek to replace its predecessor. You can freely mix Groovy with Java on a class-by-class, or even line-by-line, basis. If you are working with Java, there's no reason not to make your life easier by adding Groovy where it helps the most.