Xebia thoughts on KotlinConf

We’ve had a little time to digest since we’ve returned from KotlinConf, the largest Kotlin conference in the world. This year, the event, organized by JetBrains, gathered 1,300 professionals in the field for two days of talks, networking, and brainstorming on current and future developments in the language and its ecosystem.

Xebia was in full force as a Gold Sponsor with representatives from the Netherlands, Spain, the United States, and beyond. To kick things off, we hosted two sold-out workshops on Functional Programming in Kotlin, using the Arrow library as a tool, and a course on Reactive Spring Boot with Coroutines.

The workshops were a great experience in many ways: it was beneficial to return to in-person workshops because it enhanced opportunities to interact with attendees and showcase Xebia’s Kotlin knowledge. It was also the first time we could discuss some of the new features and ideas in the latest release of Arrow 1.2. – Alejandro Serrano, Senior Trainer and Software Developer

Interested in one of these workshops for you or your team? We got you covered; here are just a few of our available courses:

• Web Applications with Ktor
• Kotlin Professional Developer
• Functional Programming in Kotlin with Arrow
• Advanced Kotlin Training

From Ktor to KopyKat to Functional Programming

We also presented four talks at the event this year. Urs Peters and Simon Vergauwen focused on Functional Programming topics, including best features and the Arrow library. Additionally, Bjorn van der Laanen spoke on Ktor microservices on Kubernetes, and Alejandro Serrano covered transforming data with KopyKat and Optics.

We’ll add those here as they become available on the KotlinConf YouTube channel:

Developer thoughts on Kotlin’s future

As typical for conferences when you’re a sponsor, it can be challenging to attend talks when you’re busy speaking to the community at your booth (and/or giving talks). We managed to catch a few, and here are some thoughts on the announcements, presentations, and advancements we previewed: 

It was amazing to see the progress of the language and the community since the last KotlinConf 3.5 years ago. Kotlin Multiplatform has grown from experimental to beta and will soon be stable. Alongside the iOS announcement of Compose and Compose WASM on the roadmap, this will offer a strong solution for full-stack development in Kotlin. We’re also super excited to see the growth in back-end development. – Simon Vergauwen

I was looking forward to seeing creative uses of coroutines other than concurrency, so the talk about Parsus was a match made in heaven. I was impressed by the simple API you can get using coroutines in combination with other DSL features in the language. Another important topic for us is the development of the new K2 compiler, as it impacts several of our projects like Arrow Optics and Arrow Analysis. I enjoyed the talk about the new compiler plug-in API (although I wished there were fewer “UNSTABLE!” warnings in the slides), mainly because the Q&A round gave some insight into the particular design choices the Kotlin team made to ensure quality and performance also in the IDE setting. – Alejandro Serrano

Xebia’s commitment to Kotlin

Outside of the event, KotlinConf was an excellent opportunity for our team to spend quality time bonding and working collaboratively toward a bright future. You can check out our photos taken by Benjy Montoya from the event.

If you’re interested in learning more about our Kotlin services, whether it be training, backend, or Android development, please contact us today.

Also, now is a great time to mention the return of KotlinDevDay, a one-day Kotlin event happening this November 16th at the Johan Cruijff Arena. The call-for-papers is open until June 30th.

Thanks to JetBrains for a great event, and we look forward to seeing everyone next year!