Kotlin Everywhere in Barcelona

Every day there is more and more activity around Kotlin, the community is growing and Jetbrains launches new initiatives to offer online resources, as well as offline events and talks in every corner of the world. And this autumn we couldn’t miss an opportunity to organize Kotlin Everywhere in Barcelona with Jetbrains, but about it later! 

Jetbrains & Kotlin

First things first, what is JetBrains? I think everyone knows this company, but just in case, let me briefly tell you the main highlights about them: Jetbrains is a software development company whose tools are targeted towards software developers and project managers. As of 2019, the company has over 990 employees in its offices in Prague, Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Munich, Boston, Novosibirsk, Amsterdam, Foster City and Marlton, New Jersey. And in July 2011, JetBrains unveiled Project Kotlin, name comes from Kotlin Island, near St. Petersburg. Team decided to name it after an island just like Java was named after the Indonesian island of Java.

Kotlin is a cross-platform, statically typed, general-purpose programming language with type inference. Kotlin is designed to interoperate fully with Java, and the JVM version of its standard library depends on the Java Class Library, but type inference allows its syntax to be more concise. Kotlin mainly targets the JVM, but also compiles to JavaScript or native code (via LLVM). Language development costs are borne by JetBrains, while the Kotlin Foundation protects the Kotlin trademark. And Kotlin is officially supported by Google for mobile development on Android.

Kotlin gained popularity very fast and now has local communities in almost every city of the world, where Kotlin real-life activities are organized on a regular basis.

Also, Kotlin Community has a strong online presence:

• Kotlin Blog
• Kotlin website
• Kotlin Talks
• Kotlin Forum
• Stackoverflow
• Twitter
• Linkedin
• Slack
• Reddit
• Podcast
• Issue Tracker

Kotlin Everywhere – Global Event Series

In May, at Google I/O, Jetbrains announced a big step: Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first. It’s a language that many of you already love: over 50% of professional Android developers now use Kotlin, and it’s the fastest-growing language on GitHub. As part of this announcement, many new Jetpack APIs and features became offered first in Kotlin.

To help you dive deeper into Kotlin, Jetbrains also announced a new program they’re launching: Kotlin Everywhere – a series of community-driven events focussing on the potential of Kotlin on all platforms. They are aiming to help learn the essentials and best practices of using Kotlin everywhere, be it for Android, back-end, front-end and other platforms.

Hadi Hariri and Florina Muntenescu give you a sneak peak of Kotlin Everywhere: Kotlin Everywhere initiative – teaser

Whether you are a developer, a speaker, a Kotlin User Group, a Google Developer Group member or any other community leader, can host a Kotlin-focused event and this November, Apiumhub decided to host Kotlin Everywhere in Barcelona for the first time!

Organizer of Kotlin Everywhere in Barcelona: Apiumhub

Apiumhub, the organizer of Kotlin Everywhere in Barcelona, is a software development company based in Barcelona that transformed into a tech hub, mainly offering services of mobile app development, web development, software architecture, DevOps & Product Ownership.

Apiumhub regularly contributes to software development and software architecture community by offering:

• Software architecture meetups
• Global Software Architecture Summit
• Software Architecture workshops
• Software Architecture articles

And decided to lead Kotlin Everywhere initiative in Barcelona.

Kotlin Everywhere in Barcelona: Talks, Speakers & Videos

This November Apiumhub and Jetbrains decided to focus on a review of how the Kotlin (Language, Type System, Libraries, Tools, IDEs, Environment) improve the Developer Experience, increase the productivity and add more value to Business Stakeholders.

Here you may watch a short teaser from Kotlin Everywhere in Barcelona, which was organized in Cibernarium with the help of Barcelona Activa.

Speakers & Talks

Hadi Hariri – VP of Developer Advocacy at JetBrains came to Barcelona to give talks about:

1.”Kotlin on the server with Ktor”
Ktor is a web framework built from the ground up using Kotlin and coroutines. Amongst other things it allows for creating robust and performant HTTP server applications. In this talk Hadi took a look at Ktor, the ideas behind it, and how we can easily create applications and have these deployed to Google Cloud with very little effort.

Full video with the presentation and live coding: Kotlin on the server with Ktor by Hadi Hariri – Kotlin Everywhere, Barcelona

2. Functional Programming in Kotlin
In this talk Hadi explained the basics of functional programming, where it fits in with the Object Orientation paradigm and how we can use functional programming in our every day work. He covered important concepts in functional programming such as: Lambdas, Higher Order Functions, Partial Functions, Monads and more, and see how we can apply these in a series of functional patterns to cut down our codebase and at the same time make sure we keep it maintainable.

Video with the full talk: Functional Programming in Kotlin by Hadi Hariri

Also, Álvaro García – Principal Engineer in Apiumhub talked about how to “Introduce Kotlin in an incremental way”

How to introduce Kotlin in a java project while maintaining the spring performance and making the developers happy. Concept after concept transforming a java application into a hotline one and never looking back on java.”

You can watch the full video here: Migrating from Java to Kotlin

Summing up, Kotlin Everywhere in Barcelona was a success, around 200 Kotlin enthusiasts came to the event and Hadi made it very engaging and fun!

And we can’t wait to organize something together with Jetbrains and Hadi Hariri in particular again, such a pleasure!