Ken Kousen

President, Kousen IT, Inc.

Kousen IT, Inc.

Trinity College, Hartford, CT

Professional Summary

Ken Kousen is a Java Champion, the author of six technical books, and a Professor of the Practice in Computer Science at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. He runs Kousen IT, Inc., offering technical training, mentoring, and software development in Java, Kotlin, Spring, Gradle, Android, and AI/LLM topics.

📚 Books

I’ve written six technical books over the past decade, on topics ranging from the Groovy/Java intersection to modern Java functional programming, Kotlin, Gradle for Android, Mockito, and a managing-up handbook for technical professionals.

Mockito Made Clear

Mockito Made Clear

Help Your Boss Help You

Help Your Boss Help You

Kotlin Cookbook

Kotlin Cookbook

Modern Java Recipes

Modern Java Recipes

Gradle Recipes for Android

Gradle Recipes for Android

Making Java Groovy

Making Java Groovy

For earlier academic publications (from a previous life), see my Google Scholar profile.

🛠️ Projects

A few apps and open-source tools, with live demos where available.

MockHub

MCP server

A concert-ticket marketplace that doubles as a teaching platform for AI integration (Model Context Protocol).

GitHub ★4 Live demo →

certificate-service

web app

Generates a digitally-signed PDF 'certificate of ownership' for Ken's books.

GitHub ★5 Live demo →

lyrics_trainer

web app

A simple app for learning song lyrics.

GitHub ★1 Live demo →

GeminiMcpServer

MCP server

Wraps Gemini 2.5 Flash in a Model Context Protocol server.

OsqueryMcpServer

MCP server

An MCP wrapper (and Claude Code skill) for osquery system diagnostics.

gh_mcp_server

MCP server

An MCP wrapper for the GitHub gh command-line tool.

🧑‍🏫 Training Materials

Open-source course materials for AI coding tools.

Claude Code

Slides and demos for Ken's training course on Claude Code.

Codex CLI

Slides and exercises for Ken's training course on OpenAI's Codex CLI.

Antigravity

Course materials for Google Antigravity. (Repo is still named gemini-training; materials updated, repo not yet renamed.)

Spring AI

Exercises and solutions for Ken's training course on Spring AI.

LangChain4j

Exercises and code for Ken's training course on the LangChain4j framework.

🎓 Education

PhD, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

1989

Princeton University

MA, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

1986

Princeton University

MS Computer Science

2000

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

BS Mechanical Engineering

1984

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

BS Mathematics

1984

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

✨ Interests

Java, Kotlin, Groovy Spring & Spring Boot Gradle build automation Android development AI and Large Language Models

✉️ Contact

Email: ken.kousen@kousenit.com
Blog: Stuff I’ve Learned Recently
Newsletter: Tales from the jar side (Substack)
YouTube: Tales from the jar side
Location: Marlborough, CT

🤖 Agents welcome — click through to the machine-readable llms.txt.