Kenneth Kousen
Northern Virginia Software Symposium
Reston · October 27 - 29, 2017
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.
Latest Features In Java
Java is now on a six-month release schedule, with new features being added all the time. This talk summarizes the features that have been added to Java, including collection factory methods, private methods in interfaces, records, the enhanced switch statement, and more. The goal is to show not only what has been added, but why and where to use them.
Gradle In Depth
Gradle is the build tool of choice in the open source world, and rapidly becoming the standard in industry as well. Anyone who works with Gradle on a Java project knows the basics of the Java plugin and how to write simple tasks in Groovy. Gradle can do much more, however. This talk will demonstrate how to write your own custom task classes and how to create Gradle plugins from them. Other Gradle features will be demonstrated as well, including file manipulation, incremental builds, generating the Grade wrapper, and resolving conflicts in dependencies.