Probably, each person working in the sphere of information technology is supposed to develop their skills and learn something new. Stfalcon.com team is not an exсeption. Last weekend we were visiting the first in Ukraine conference on Kotlin — «Kotlin Night Kyiv»
So, what do we know about Kotlin? It is a powerful programming language created in 2011 by JetBrains company and performed on JVM platform. Andrej Breslav, Lead Language Designer of Kotlin, was present on the opening of the conference via Skype. He said that this language is first of all aimed at being the most convenient and flexible. Moreover, it is a powerful development tool, which JetBrains has created for its own needs and now shares with the world. The main idea is to implement all the features missed in other languages. You may agree that quite often, when developing some functions, we are in lack of something or we have a vision how to make it easier but are not able to do so.
Even though it was the first conference, the organization level was high anyway. There were speakers not only from different cities of Ukraine, but also from abroad. The lectures were on various topics and were divided in two streams so that everyone could choose something specific. There were lectures for both mobile app and beckend developers. For instance, our team was interested in the lecture of Artyom Dorosh about Android Clean Architecture. Btw, his speech caused an intensive discussions among our team members: there were many But-s and Why‑s, with some statements we couldn’t agree at all, but anyway, in disputes one discovers new things.
Then we were listening to a presentation about the automation of experiments (partial function introduction and its testing on limited amount of users) on large projects via Kotlin DSL, on the example of OK.ru social media network.
Some of our developers got interested in new opportunities of the languages mentioned by Andrey Breslav, such as Сoroutines - a new approach for the launching of asynchronized tasks and communication between them in Kotlin. I should mention that even though this function is in beta testing stage, our co-mates immediately lit up to test it.
Also, there was time for rest and coffee breaks which let us discuss the lectures with other developers. Then we had some more exciting topics which were connected with mainstreams of the modern world and IT, such as realization of Deep Learning on Kotlin. Definitely, there were a lot of questions and suggestions as for using this technology on current projects.
In the end, we would like to say 'thanks' to the organizers and partners of the conference for interesting lectures. We have learnt many new and useful things. Hope to meet next year over again!
