Writing Kotlin efficiently

About the workshop:

If you are an Android developer who has used/is currently using Java, you’ve probably come across these frustrating challenges:

• Lots of code to accomplish very little
• Nightmare of NullPointerExceptions
• Standard operations like reading a file alone are cumbersome
• Dealing with legacy Java APIs

Kotlin as a programming language was written to address these challenges and more to help make your codebase easier to maintain and scale. However, when shifting from Java to Kotlin, developers often end up writing Java-style code or look for familiar Java patterns and that’s where problems emerge.

With this workshop, we will help developers get introduced to the “Kotlin way” of approaching problems. We will use different, real-world examples to help you and your team write more “functional” code using Kotlin when building large-scale Android apps. This workshop is a first stepping stone in your Kotlin journey, and to fully unleash Kotlin’s powers, it’s important to ensure that your Kotlin codebase becomes more idiomatic.

(Please note: This is a second edition of our last workshop and only meant for people who did not get a chance to attend it then)

Topics that will be covered:

• Using data class and sealed classes effectively
• Utilizing top level functions and lambdas for more concise code
• Handling nulls safely
• Applying transformations to Collections
• Cleaner I/O operations that do the work for you
• Replacing Java-style Builder patterns
• Working with productivity boosters like extensions and scoping functions

You should sign-up if:

We highly recommend this workshop for Android development teams to write effective Kotlin and improve the maintainability of your codebase through a shared understanding.

• You are migrating your codebase to Kotlin
• You are building Android apps at scale using Kotlin
• You are evaluating benefits of writing Android apps using Kotlin
• You are a Kotlin enthusiast

About the speakers:

Vinay Shenoy is an Android Engineer at Obvious. He believes that refactoring should be done continuously and not left for the “future”, and embracing change instead of fighting it. You’ll usually find him pushing for sustainable work practices and automating workflows.

Sasikanth is an Android Engineer at Obvious He has a keen interest in creating beautiful UI/UX and likes trying out various other frameworks and languages. In his free time, he works on side projects to learn and try new things, as was evident in one of his creations - a productivity app called Pinnit. He blogs at sasikanth.dev where he talks about programming.

Workshop Requirements:

This will be a hands-on workshop so you will need access to a personal computer with the Android development toolchain setup as follows:

1. Installed Android Studio (Current stable: 4.1.2 )
2. Updated Kotlin plugin (Current release: 1.4.30 )

Seats available:

Workshop is open for 30 participants only.

References to our work:

Simple Android app built entirely in Kotlin
Leveraging Sealed Classes - Sanchita Agarwal
Function purity with examples in Kotlin
Dealing with production code in tests - Sasikanth