June Meetup: Kotlin 101, Immutables Library, & Backend Driven Native UIs

June was an exciting month for us! Our June meetup hit a record number of attendees, and our meetup has over 3,500+ members now. Thanks to everyone who came out and those who continue to support this community every month. Our June meetup talks were comprised of very targeted presentations. We hope everyone left with new tidbits of knowledge as we code onwards.

Daniel Nizri of Yodle gave the first talk on Kotlin 101 features and why it matters for Android. Daniel said, “I would highly recommend the Kotlin Koans to anyone who wants to get started with the language. It’s a great online tutorial where you can write small amounts of Kotlin code to solve problems and get familiar with the language syntax and features.”

To try Kotlin out yourself, he suggested, “… you can enable Kotlin in your existing Android project in a few minutes by following the instructions here – and then use the Java to Kotlin converter to see how your Activities, Fragments, etc. can be written in Kotlin.” Check out Daniel’s slides here and his Kotlin demo here.

Our second talk was about the Immutables Library, given by Brian Plummer from The New York Times. He showed how the open source library uses annotation processing to provide builders for your objects to make them immutable, and how easy it was to setup an immutable data model for your application. His #1 tip?  “Start small, see how you like. Convert one object at a time. This is not a library that you have to change everything all at once.” For more info, see Brian’s slides and his tiny sample app.

Diego Capelo from Spotify closed out the night with a talk on Backend Driven Native UIs, a talk that many were curious about. Diego summarized his talk into one simple sentence: “”It’s all about separation of concerns”. You can see his presentation here.