The Instil team have adopted Kotlin as our go to language for Android and server development. One of the unexpected side effects has been a significant boost in morale. It's a proven fact that writing Kotlin code just makes people smile. We do not think that it's right to sit on this cure for developer unhappiness; given the chance we like to get out of the office and spread the word; so when we heard that the Google Developer Group (GDG) Dublin were putting on a Kotlin night we signed up to evangelise, packed our bags and headed down to Google HQ.
Rule #4: Every good meetup starts with pizza
The proceedings kicked off with a hefty Dominos delivery under the watchful eye of a Google Android.
Now fortified on cheese the one hundred, or so, strong crowd gathered in the meetup room so that our host from GDG Dublin, Rory Glynn, could open the proceedings.
A seamless journey into the awesome world of Kotlin! - Tomás Hanley
Tomás talked about how fate had led him to Kotlin. He spoke about his early experiments which led to adoption of the language by the the team in Toast. His introductory talk finished with some insights into the formation of the Dublin Kotlin User Group and the topics they have been covering, including programming a drone with Android and Kotlin.
Kotlin DSL & Gradle 5.0 - Justin Slade
Justin, a mobile app architect at VHI, introduced the topic of Domain Specific Language (DSL) and how they can be built and applied in Kotlin. He then showed us the autodsl library which allows you to use annotations to remove the heartache when creating DSLs. He rounded his talk off by walking through how he had switched his gradle.build files to use the Kotlin DSL.
Demystifying Coroutines - Eamonn Boyle
Eamonn, a trainer in Instil, rounded off the evening with a talk about the how and what of Coroutines. He started by demonstrating how using Coroutines can simplify your code before explaining how all of the 'magic' works under the hood. He completed proceedings by laying out some examples of Coroutines in the wild.
Get Involved
We have recently started the Belfast Kotlin User Group. We have a great line up scheduled for the first event and details will be announced soon. I would also recommend the Dublin Kotlin User Group.
Learn More
Our training team offer a range of Kotlin training courses. See our kotlin training page. In addition if you need help developing an application in Kotlin we can provide a wide range of services from consultancy to full teams of engineers.
Article By
Richard Bell
Head of Delivery