Kenneth Kousen
Great Lakes Software Symposium
Chicago · November 3 - 5, 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
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.
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.
Special Topics In Java
This talk will focus on interesting features of Java 8 that go beyond the basics. Topics will include:
- the
map
,filter
, andflatMap
methods - simple reductions
- extracting and combining streams
- using
Optional
as intended - grouping and partitioning
- downstream collectors
- the
java.time
package - generics in detail