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.
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At long last, Making Java Groovy
I guess you could say it all started with Jason Rudolph. In April of 2005, I decided to leave the training company where I worked (The Golden Consulting Group, which no longer exists) and go out on my own as an independent technical trainer. My one-person company is called Kousen IT, Inc., and if the…
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Gr8 Gr8Conf.US Was Gr8
This week I attended Gr8Conf US in Minneapolis. I did a Groovy workshop for Java developers, gave my Making Java Groovy talk, gave a talk on Grails testing, and even managed to throw in an Advanced Groovy Tips and Tricks talk at the last minute when Guillaume Laforge was unable to travel. (Guillaume said he…
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A Groovy Chuck Norris Script
This week I’m at UberConf (http://uberconf.com), a truly alpha-geek experience with sessions morning, afternoon, and evening. On Tuesday I did a day-long tutorial on Groovy for Java developers, which was really fun. I love teaching Groovy to existing Java developers. Sometimes they get tears in their eyes at how much easier life can be. 🙂…
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Categories, old and new, and status of Making Java Groovy
My book, Making Java Groovy, is almost finished. I mean, I’m done, except that I’m not. (Picture Michael Corleone in “Godfather, Part III”: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”) I thought I was essentially done in early June, after I turned in the last chapter. Then the reviews came…
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Getting Insight from Data: Baseball
Big Data is cited by many prognosticators as a major growth area in computer science over the next decade. While definitions of Big Data abound, the basic idea is that data is being collected as such a rate and with such volume now that traditional ways of saving and analyzing it no longer suffice. (Neal…
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My Review of Programming Grails
Originally submitted at O’Reilly Best Practices for Experienced Grails Developers Programming Grails Excellent look under the hood of Grails By Ken Kousen from Marlborough, CT on 9/25/2012 5out of 5 Pros: Accurate, Helpful examples, Easy to understand Best Uses: Intermediate, Expert Describe Yourself: Developer, Educator Yes, this “early access” edition is very early, but…
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Adding a license to source files
A few years ago I remember seeing a blog post by a person interviewing potential new developers. He said that when the prospect featured Java prominently on their resume, he would make sure to give them a programming test that would be easy to solve in a different language but hard in Java, just to…
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(dc..bos): Train Stations as a Groovy Range
I’ve been working on a presentation about interesting features in Groovy, and I came up with an example that I like but is probably too long to do in the available time, so I thought I’d show it here. The idea is to illustrate how any class can be made into a Groovy range by…
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Password authentication using Groovy
This week I was at a client site that was about as locked down as any I’ve seen. Personally I find that incredibly short-sighted on the part of the company, but it’s always easier to say no, I suppose. While it was annoying enough to set up a browser to surf the web, that’s not…
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From now on, I’m calling it GroovyString
I’ve been doing a lot of introductory Groovy presentations lately, and an issue keeps coming up that I feel I have to address. I’ve had to think hard about how to do this, though, because I don’t want to be misunderstood. I’m probably going to fumble it a bit, so please forgive me if I…