Kenneth Kousen

Mental Bookmarks and the Fractal Nature of Success

Good discussions are supposed to diverge from their intended path. Free association is a feature, not a bug, and helps you see new connections between ideas. Without structure, however, it can be difficult to add context to new ideas and understand how they relate to more immediate problems. This talk discusses the technique of mental bookmarks – how to remember where you were when a discussion diverged. In addition to giving you a reputation for having an amazing memory, the skill also helps with personal awareness in general.

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.

Kotlin: Safe, Pragmatic Interoperability on the JVM

Kotlin is a practical language designed for the JVM. It focuses on pragmatism and safety, with an emphasis on interoperability and tool support. Kotlin is statically typed and includes null checks in the type system itself. The language runs anywhere Java does, from microservices to Android apps. This workshop will show how to use Kotlin to simplify anything you originally planned to do in Java.

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, and flatMap methods
• simple reductions
• extracting and combining streams
• using Optional as intended
• grouping and partitioning
• downstream collectors
• the java.time package
• generics in detail