Welcome to the Kousen IT newsletter!
Hi all,
My name is Ken Kousen, and I'm the owner and sole employee of Kousen IT, Inc. For those interested in resume fodder, here's the blurb I use as my bio on the No Fluff, Just Stuff (NFJS) conference tour site:
"Ken Kousen is a Java Champion and the author of the O'Reilly books Modern Java Recipes and Gradle Recipes for Android and the Manning book Making Java Groovy. He also has recorded over a dozen video courses for Safari Books Online, covering topics related to Android, Spring, Java, Groovy, Grails, and Gradle.
"In 2013, 2016, and 2017 he won a JavaOne Rockstar award. His academic background include BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics from M.I.T., an MA and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I. He is currently President of Kousen IT, Inc., based in Connecticut."
I'm also the co-host of the Groovy Podcast, which is about events related to the Groovy programming language. We publish a new podcast roughly every three weeks or so.
My Twitter handle is @kenkousen. In this newsletter, I plan to talk about more personal topics than I tweet about. Twitter is very public, and so is my blog, but somehow this newsletter feels more intimate to me. Here I'll talk about my upcoming books, speaking engagements, personal anecdotes, and anything I'm finding interesting in the world these days (primarily technical, but occasionally more).
My plan is to publish a new one roughly every week, though we'll see about that. I'm currently working on multiple books at the moment, which I'll talk about later. I normally don't say anything about an upcoming book until it's nearly finished, but here I'll share much more about them. I'll also talk about preparing for the new season of the NFJS tour and other conferences, and even musical performances.
For the record, it's not obvious, but my last name "Kousen" is pronounced like the relative, "cousin". No one in my family knows why. My paternal grandfather emigrated from Russia early in the last century, and he was an odd duck on the best of days. My uncle (my father's brother) claimed to have done a genealogy of the family on that side and found out what our name originally was in the old country, but I'm not sure what it was and I'm not sure I believe him. I think it vaguely resembled "Kutzen", which is oddly close to the word Kotlin, a programming language I'm spending a lot of time with these days.
That's why my company name is "Kousen IT, Inc.", which I pronounce Cousin Eye-Tee, but my wife pronounces Cousin Itt, like the Addams Family character.
Last week (23 Dec -- today):
Pretty quiet, because nobody schedules classes the week of Christmas. I mostly spent it writing, on projects I'll talk about soon.
On Thursday, however, I planned to fly to Houston and back on a "mileage run". United now required both 100K miles and $12K dollars in order to maintain 1K status, and I had the miles but not the dollars (due to a mixup when I spoke at GIDS in Bangalore last April). I had the miles, but I was about $800 short. There aren't that many places I can fly direct on United from BDL (Bradley Airport in Windsor Locks, CT -- my home airport). A direct, 1st class flight to Chicago wasn't enough and a flight to Denver was too much, so the flight to Houston was just right.
As it happened, I woke up at 5:30am on Thursday for my 7:45am flight (the airport is about 40 minutes away), only to discover that the flight had been delayed by 9 1/2 hours (!) due to weather problems somewhere in the midwest.
I called the special phone number for 1K members (one of the reasons I want to keep my status) and we were able to move the trip from Thursday to Friday instead. Of course, that meant a second morning of getting up at 5:30am, but at least on Thursday I was able to go back to sleep.On Friday made the flight. It's about 4 hours each way, with about a 5 hour layover in the middle. I did manage to write on the way down and some in the United club in Houston, but I wound up sleeping most of the way back. At least that's done, however, and as of today my account now says "Over $12,000" in premier qualifying dollars. Hallelujah. Since United is raising the required amount to $15K next year and I'm trying to do as many online courses as possible, 2019 is probably my last year as a 1K member.
On Saturday, I took the family to see Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which was awesome. Best superhero move in years and best Spider-Man movie since the first one.
This week (30 Dec 2018 -- 6 Jan 2019)
No classes again this week, with New Year's in the mix. My wife and I are going to go to the recently re-opened Marlborough Tavern for New Year's Eve. I'm not big on celebrations like that, but she is, so we'll go and see what happens. It's pricey, but the menu looks really good.
Meeting online with two of my editors, after which I'll talk about those projects.
Friday afternoon I have a client meeting talking about an upcoming Spring and Spring Boot course, which should be fun. They both local and fun people.
If you haven't seen it, check out the cricket story, which went from a tweet storm into the Washington Post.
I hope you enjoy the newsletter,
Ken