Ken Kousen
Ken Kousen
@kousenit@kousenit.org

I am a Java Champion and the author of the books “Mockito Made Clear” and “Help Your Boss Help You”, (Pragmatic Bookshelf), “Kotlin Cookbook”, (O’Reilly Media), “Modern Java Recipes” (O’Reilly Media), “Gradle Recipes for Android” (O’Reilly Media), and “Making Java Groovy” (Manning), as well as over a dozen video courses at Safari Books Online. I’m a regular member of the No Fluff, Just Stuff conference tour and have given talks all over the world. Through my company, Kousen IT, Inc, I’ve taught training courses to and worked with thousands of developers.

241 posts
8 followers
  • Fun with Time Zones in Java 8

    [Note: Revised based on suggestions in the comments.] They say that one way to identify a software developer is to whisper the word “timezone” in their ear and see if they shudder. That’s certainly true for me, though my reaction is based more on travel and trying to arrange conference calls across time zones than…

  • Excluding Gradle Tasks with a Name Pattern

    I’ve been spending a lot of time with Gradle build files in Android projects, which probably isn’t a big surprise given that I’m working on a book called Gradle Recipes for Android (coming soon to all your better ebook stores and (who knows?) maybe an actual, physical bookstore somewhere (but probably not), but you can…

  • Retrofitting Groovy

    I’m teaching an Android development class this week, and one of our primary references is the book Android 6 for Programmers, 3rd edition, which was released last December. One of the examples in the book accesses the Open Weather Map RESTful web service and builds a UI around the results, which is pretty much the…

  • A Groovy approach to npm-gate

    Recently the JavaScript community experienced a serious disruption when a developer removed one of his deployed libraries from the central npm server, an event now being referred to as npm-gate. I don’t want to get into the various ethical, moral, or legal issues about that here. Rather, I want to show how trivially the missing functionality…

  • The Shadow Knows Gradle

    Someone recently complained on Twitter that the so-called Shadow plugin for Gradle, written by the inestimable John Engleman, no longer worked on Gradle 2.11 or 2.12. Commenters were quick to point out that the latest version (1.2.3) of the plugin did work. I thought I’d put together this quick blog post to demonstrate that it…

  • Rough cut of Gradle Recipes for Android now available

    My latest book, Gradle Recipes for Android, is now available as a “Rough Cut” at O’Reilly. You can get it at http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032656.do. Rough cuts are preliminary versions of O’Reilly books, which are released while a book is still in progress, without special effort taken for formatting or anything else. In this case, however, the rough…

  • My father, at the end

    Back May of 2010, my mother called to let me know that my father was going into the hospital for minor surgery. There was nothing to worry about, and no reason for me to drive all the way there just to see him, especially since he was only going to be in the hospital for…

  • Upcoming Events, and “The Streak”

    I’m really not a workaholic. I prefer days off as much as anybody. The problem is that there are all these things I want to do, so I volunteer to do them, and suddenly I’m overbooked so much I don’t have time for a break. I think part of it comes down to an acronym…

  • Concurrent Kitties Using GPars

    On today’s Groovy Podcast, I mentioned that I was teaching a Groovy training class this week at Research Now in Plano, TX. That’s not how I said it, though. I said that I was broadcasting live in front of a studio audience and that they were the most amazingly awesome group I’ve ever encountered. (Yeah,…

  • Groovy posts in other places

    Recently I’ve been writing about Groovy and Grails for my friends at Accelebrate. I do that because: They’re a great client They support what I do They pay me CASH MONEY The only problem is, whenever I post there, I don’t post here. I thought, therefore, that I’d add some links here to let everyone…