Talking Kotlin

In this episode we chat with Zac Sweers about all that has happened since his last appearance:

Multiplatform experiments

Kotlin usage in Slack

Thoughts about Compose

Weather in Munich, Malaga, and New York

Zac on Twitter - https://twitter.com/ZacSweers

Zac's website - https://www.zacsweers.dev/

In this episode Hadi and Seb are talking to Margarita Nedzelska from SonarSource about how she and her team built a working static analyzer for Kotlin.

Victor Kropp tells us the story of moving JetBrains Toolbox from C++ to 100% Kotlin. Victor (https://twitter.com/kropp) leads the Toolbox team at JetBrains, a small app that is the single entry point for developing with JetBrains IDEs, which you can download at https://www.jetbrains.com/toolbox-app/. It allows you to automatically download and update your IDEs, and open all your projects with a single click.

Victor shares the story of how toolbox came to be – from its humble beginnings as an internal Hackathon project back in 2015, to an app serving 1 million monthly active users. Together, we dive into the tech stack of Toolbox and its evolution. We learn about the initial tech stack: C++ for the business logic and JavaScript and React for the user interface. Victor shares the challenges and benefits of using this stack – from hiring to UI visuals.

We learn why Toolbox took the big step of migrating from C++ to Kotlin, from the ability to reuse code in the IntelliJ platform to developer ergonomics. Victor takes us through the multi-step process of how they arrived at a pure-Kotlin solution. The first step we talk about is the migration of the Toolbox business logic to Kotlin using Regex wizardry and reimplementing methods with the help of Kotlin’s auto-converter.

Victor then sheds some light on replacing the embedded web user interface with Compose for Desktop (https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/compose/), and the benefits Toolbox gained from it: reducing the load of having to serialize a lot of objects, being able to use the same language when implementing a full feature front to back, library reuse, and better performance. We learn that this transition only took 6 months, while still being able to ship new features to Toolbox at the same time, and why the team chose Kotlin on the JVM instead of Kotlin/Native.

With React and Compose for Desktop both being modern declarative UI frameworks, Victor also talks more about how concepts and vocabulary transfers between the two (https://tigeroakes.com/posts/react-to...), lowering the barrier of entry for people who want to build native user interfaces and already have web development experience. We also learn more about how Toolbox moved design primitives and UI components from the CSS to the Compose layout system, among other topics.

Seb also compliments Hadi on the Ktor 2.0 presentation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mye9N...) from the Kotlin 2021 Premier Online Event (https://pages.jetbrains.com/kotlin-pr...).

We sit down with Marina Shishkina, team lead for the Release and Automation Team in Kotlin. Her team coordinates the whole release procedure for new versions of the Kotlin programming language. Marina shares her story of how she moved from being a Quality Assurance Engineer to leading the Release Team, working on increasing the quality of Kotlin releases.

In this episode we talk to Nat Pryce and Duncan McGregor about the new "Java to Kotlin: A Refactoring Guidebook" and their experience of helping companies and independent developers to migrate to Kotlin.

We talked to Ole Sasse and Gregor Zeitlinger, Senior Engineers at Zalando and leaders of their “Kotlin Guild”, about the weather in Spain and Germany, but more importantly, about how Zalando has successfully introduced Kotlin on the server-side.

Ole and Gregor talk about the way that Kotlin engineers organize themselves inside Zalando, using their “Guild” model which allows engineers across different teams to share knowledge with each other and learn about new and more complex topics and libraries together.

In addition to Android and frontend, Zalando’s logistics department uses Kotlin to build server-side microservices. We learned about the frameworks their engineers use, including Spring and Ktor, and how Kotlin was first introduced at Zalando and integrated seamlessly with their pre-existing custom libraries, earning an “Adopt” spot in Zalando’s Tech Radar (https://opensource.zalando.com/tech-radar/).

Together, we also tackled one of the classic questions about Kotlin: how do you get people on board? Gregor shared his insights on the topic, and how to get people to have their first “a-ha” moment with Kotlin, and Ole chimed in with more information on convincing Scala versus Java developers. We also learned why most teams using Kotlin for the backend prefer to write their whole services in Kotlin code, and saw the contrast with Zalando’s mobile application development, among many other topics.

Explore more about Kotlin and Zalando:

Zally, A minimalistic, simple-to-use API linter from Zalando: https://github.com/zalando/zally

“How we use Kotlin for backend services at Zalando”: https://engineering.zalando.com/posts/2021/07/kotlin-for-backend-services.html

Do Kotlin at Zalando: https://jobs.zalando.com/en/jobs/?search=kotlin

Zalando Engineering: https://engineering.zalando.com/

In this episode, we sit down with Mohit Sarveiya, Google Developer Expert in Kotlin and Android, to talk about everything coroutines.

We sit down with Aydar Mukhametzyanov, Software Developer at JetBrains to talk about Kotlin and AppCode – the what, how, and why.

Together with the Kotlin community, we have prepared a special episode of the Talking Kotlin podcast!

It is dedicated to Kotlin's 10th anniversary and features 6 guests talking about their journeys with the language.

Check it out!

In this episode, we’ll sit down with Ksenia Shneyveys, the Kotlin Manager for Education and University Relations at JetBrains, and talk to her about the current state and future of Kotlin in academia. Kseniya will tell us about the recent increase in institutions and educators teaching Kotlin, including adoption by Stanford, Cambridge, Imperial College London, University of Chicago, and many other prestigious institutions.