Kenneth Kousen
President, Kousen IT, Inc.
Hartford, Connecticut, United States
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Ken Kousen is the author of the Pragmatic Programmers 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 is a regular speaker on the No Fluff, Just Stuff conference tour, and has spoken at conferences all over the world. He is a Java Champion, a JavaOne Rock Star, and a Devnexus Rock Star. Currently he a Professor of the Practice of Computer Science and Associate Director for STEM Initiatives at the Entrepreneurship Center at Trinity College in Hartford, CT.
In addition to various industry certifications, he has BS degrees in both Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering from M.I.T., an MA and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I.
Awards
Area of Expertise
Topics
Cool Features in JUnit and AssertJ
This session highlights the best features of the JUnit and AssertJ testing libraries. That will include running tests in parallel, parameterized tests from a variety of sources, custom extensions for callbacks, and much more.
Mockito Features and Best Practices
This session shows the features and optimal ways to generated mocks, stubs, and spies with Mockito. Find out when tools like Mockito are useful and how best to employ them to diagnose issues in your code. Features covered will include creating mocks and stubs, mocking final methods and classes, mocking static methods, and spying on existing classes. It will also cover when NOT to use mocks and stubs, so you don't waste time testing the wrong things.
Spring AI
The experimental project Spring AI is based on ideas from other libraries, like LangChain4J. It provides a systematic way of incorporating the OpenAI APIs like ChatGPT into Java systems. Spring AI includes capabilities like prompt templates, output processors, data loaders, and basic Spring dependency injection to make it easy to work with and customize AI tools.
Spring with Kotlin
The Kotlin language adds capabilities like reified types, domain-specific languages, sequences, and even coroutines to the JVM. The Spring framework has always been friendly to non-Java languages on the JVM, and Kotlin is no exception. This session will review great ways to incorporate Kotlin capabilities into Spring applications, including Spring Boot and Spring Data.
A Data-Oriented Programming Approach to REST APIs
This session will use records, sealed interfaces, and pattern matching for switch to access RESTful web services. The approach takes advantage of concepts from Data-Oriented Programming like immutability, explicit data representations, and expressive behavior. At least one example will involve making text and vision requests to an AI service, and how to implement that effectively using Java 21+.
A Java Tier List: Ranking the Features from Java 1.8 to 23
In this session, we'll rank the features added to Java between versions 1.8 and 23. Those include the basic functional features, like streams, lambdas, and method references, through code improvements like switch expressions, records, and pattern matching. We'll include simple topics like LVTI and collection factory methods, as well more recent additions like sealed interfaces and virtual threads. Vote for your favorite (and/or least favorite) feature!
JUnit 5's Best Features
The team that rewrote JUnit in version 5 did a fantastic job improving the platform while maintaining backward compatibility. Many Java developers don't realize how many new cool capabilities have been added to the framework since the initial 5.0 release. This talk will cover topics like the set of useful functional interfaces available, how to do parameterized tests with various sources, lazy loading of error messages, and more.
LangChain4j: The Awesome Framework for AI and Java
This workshop helps you add AI capabilities to your Java systems using the excellent LangChain4j framework. Add chat capabilities, image generation, vision models, text-to-speech, transcription, and more, quickly and easily. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) will also be included, using a variety of sources, including pdf, HTML, Word docs, and URL resources. The workshop will also demonstrate how to access models added to your local machine using the Ollama system.
Managing Your AI-Driven Manager
The threat to your job isn’t that an AI can replace you — it’s that a manager will think AI can replace you. This talk covers how to build a relationship with your manager that makes you their primary technical ally. The idea is to become the person they trust to evaluate both the benefits — and the costs — of using AI tools, showing where they can help and where you really need to be careful using them. In a rapidly changing world, you can become the person your manager relies on to give them good advice, all while you get to enjoy playing with the latest toys.
Whispers of the Lost Hartford: An AI Opera Experience
Two AI tools are used to create a short libretto for a classic opera given a frankly ridiculous situation. Another model acts as a reviewer to evaluate the result. Illustrations are generated using an image generator. Snippets of music are created from parts of the text using a music generator. A podcast is then generated discussing the quality and historical ramifications of the opera, using yet another model. It's AI models all the way down, with appropriately tragic results.
Devnexus 2025 Sessionize Event Upcoming
JChampions Conference 2025 Sessionize Event Upcoming
Devnexus 2024 Sessionize Event
Kenneth Kousen
President, Kousen IT, Inc.
Hartford, Connecticut, United States
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