Kenneth Kousen

Gradle Workshop

9:00 AM MDT

The Gradle build tool has been adopted by the vast majority of open source projects and is growing rapidly in industry as well. Gradle provides a powerful DSL for customizing and managing your build, with flexible configuration features and sophisticated dependency management. Gradle is also actively supported by a commercial entity, and in partnership with companies like Netflix and LinkedIn is currently being optimized for performance.

This workshop is designed to get you started on Gradle, from its basic capabilities up through advanced techniques like build scans, the build cache, and resolutions strategies.

Topics will include:

• Projects and tasks
• Initialization, configuration, and execution times
• File system capabilities
• Incremental builds
• Script and binary plugins
• Dependency management
• Multi-project builds
• Build scans
• The build cache
• Creating your own plugin

Functional Java, Part 1

8:30 AM MDT

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.

Also includes method references and static and default methods in interfaces.

Functional Java, Part 2

10:30 AM MDT

Functional features in Java, including parallel streams, the java.util.function package, the Optional data type, and reduction operations.

The talk also covers the new date and time package based on Joda time, as well as collectors and implementing the Collector interface.

Refactoring to Java 8

1:00 PM MDT

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.

Examples will include replacing anonymous inner classes with lambdas, switching from iterating over collections into transforming streams, using immutables wherever possible, lazy evaluation, and more.

Special Topics In Java

2:45 PM MDT

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

Sample code will be provided to illustrate all the techniques, along with tests and a build file.

Beyond Managing Your Manager

8:30 PM MDT

This is a revised and updated version of the previous talk, with current thinking from practice and the literature. The talk presents why conflicts with your manager are inevitable based on differences in priorities and perspectives, and how to plan for them. The goal is to show you how to build the loyalty relationship that allows you to get what you need when you need it.

Topics covered will include diagnosing communication styles, lessons from game theory, working within the organizational hierarchy, and lessons on how to build a relationship with your manager that still allows you the freedom to express yourself and what you really want.

Groovy and Java 8

9:00 AM MDT

Groovy works cleanly with Java 8, but goes beyond it. In additional to basic functional programming, Groovy also provides techniques to use memoization, trampolining, tail recursion, and closure currying. Groovy also makes it easy to use closures to process relational data, both with simple queries and when calling stored procedures.

Groovy also includes closure composition to assemble functions, as well as traits, which go beyond the new interface capabilities in Java 8. All of these features will be demonstrated, along with tests.

Gradle In Depth

11:00 AM MDT

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.

Gradle Inc also provides a free build scan capability to analyze build files. This too will be demonstrated, as well as profiling your build, determining dependencies, and more.

Gradle Recipes for Android

1:30 PM MDT

Android applications no longer use Ant or IDE builds. The new build mechanism is based on Gradle, the popular build tool from the Groovy ecosystem. This talk will introduce Gradle to Android developers and show how easy it is to integrate into Android projects.

The latest version of the Android Studio IDE will be used to develop applications. Topics will include using the Android plugin for Gradle, adding dependencies and alternate repositories, creating custom tasks, implementing both unit and integration tests, using alternative build types, product flavors and variants, and more.