Kenneth Kousen

Mental Bookmarks and the Fractal Nature of Success

5:00 PM MDT

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.

To give the technique context, we'll look at the fractal nature of success – the way we tend to see our current environment in relative terms, always comparing ourselves to those slightly more successful and slightly less successful.

Key Gradle Concepts And Practices

5:00 PM MDT

Gradle has been described as the open source project with the most documentation that doesn't help. Key concepts, like the different steps Gradle takes at initialization time, configuration time, and execution time are not obvious, but must be understood to use Gradle effectively. This talk will cover those topics, as well as how to use source sets, IDE integration, testing in parallel, the build cache, and multi-project builds.

New topics to be included based include writing your own custom tasks, using version constraints, archiving and expanding files and folders, and incremental builds for efficiency.

Recently revised to include dependency conflict resolution, lazy task creation, the TOML file for versioning, and more.

Latest Features In Java

9:00 AM MDT

Java is now on a six-month release schedule, with new features being added all the time. This talk summarizes the features that have been added to Java, including collection factory methods, private methods in interfaces, records, the enhanced switch statement, and more. The goal is to show not only what has been added, but why and where to use them.

Additional topics will include Local Variable Type Inference, the new HTTP client, the pattern matching, and text blocks. This talk will be updated throughout the year as more features are added to new releases.

Effective JUnit Jupiter, with AssertJ

11:00 AM MDT

The fundamental testing libraries in Java have undergone complete redesigns in the past few years. JUnit 5, known as JUnit Jupiter, redesigns the most well-known tool in all of testing. This talk will demonstrate the new features, how they are intended to be used, and discuss experimental ideas in the pipeline.

JUnit has been remarkably stable over the years and is one of the most widely adopted frameworks in the Java world. The latest version, JUnit 5, takes JUnit to the next level. Full of new features like conditional test execution, parametric testing, labeling and filtering tests, and more, it brings all the modern thinking on testing into the JUnit world. It also takes advantage of the functional features added to Java since version 8 to create a powerful, new library for testing your code.

Kotlin Workshop

1:00 PM MDT

Learn the basic syntax and semantics for the Kotlin programming language. Kotlin is an alternative JVM language that provides null safety, static typing, and powerful IDE support. This workshop will give you the chance to code in Kotlin, highlighting its similarities and differences from Java, how to use functional programming skills, work with collections, access restful web services, and more.

This workshop will examine features of Kotlin at a greater depth than most tutorials. Coroutines – the most popular feature of the language – will also be covered, as well as higher order functions, reduction operations like reduce and fold, and lambdas with receivers. Those topics progress toward building DSLs and builders in Kotlin. Terms like “apply”, “let”, “use”, “also”, and “with” will be covered along with their typical use cases.

Details of the type system, including the Any, Unit, and Nothing classes, will be included. Examples will be provided on how to define extension functions, infix operators, and inlining functions for efficiency.

Kotlin Workshop

3:00 PM MDT

Learn the basic syntax and semantics for the Kotlin programming language. Kotlin is an alternative JVM language that provides null safety, static typing, and powerful IDE support. This workshop will give you the chance to code in Kotlin, highlighting its similarities and differences from Java, how to use functional programming skills, work with collections, access restful web services, and more.

This workshop will examine features of Kotlin at a greater depth than most tutorials. Coroutines – the most popular feature of the language – will also be covered, as well as higher order functions, reduction operations like reduce and fold, and lambdas with receivers. Those topics progress toward building DSLs and builders in Kotlin. Terms like “apply”, “let”, “use”, “also”, and “with” will be covered along with their typical use cases.

Details of the type system, including the Any, Unit, and Nothing classes, will be included. Examples will be provided on how to define extension functions, infix operators, and inlining functions for efficiency.