Velos Weekend of Kotlin 2018

June 9th — June 10th, 2018

For our first technical event, we hosted a 2-day workshop at our Velos office for Android Developers to learn how to transition to Kotlin using hands-on exercises.

The workshop went extremely well — our 16 spots filled up, and we had all 16 students attend both days of workshops and gain confidence in using Kotlin for their day-to-day projects!

Here’s the original invitation we sent out:

Kotlin is now an officially supported language for Android development, and it’s quickly growing in popularity!

So if you’re an Android developer thinking of transitioning to Kotlin, or just want to see if Kotlin is right for your team, this workshop is for you! Over two days, we will cover basic Kotlin syntax, conventions, good practices, and move on to build a working Android app. By the end of the workshop, you will walk away with a solid understanding of the benefits of Kotlin, and the ability to start thinking in Kotlin for Android development.

We did ask our attendees to make sure they met the basic prerequisites:

Prerequisites For This Workshop

You should be comfortable building Android apps in Java.

You will need your normal Android Studio set up for Android development. If you have v3.0+ of Android Studio, you will be ready to use Kotlin. Otherwise, please refer to https://kotlinlang.org/docs/tutorials/kotlin-android.html to install the Kotlin plugin.

We will be doing Kotlin Koans for a portion of the workshop. We ask you to install the EduTools plugin in your Android Studio to be able to work with Kotlin Koans. It should only take you about 5 minutes. https://kotlinlang.org/docs/tutorials/edu-tools-learner.html

You will need a basic understanding of Git.

Please bring your laptop for development, as well as an Android test phone if you do not use an emulator.

We also offered scholarships to a few attendees to be able to attend the workshop!

The Workshop

We broke down the workshop into two days of lectures, alongside plenty of hands-on exercises.

Day 1: Introduction to Kotlin

Day 1 focused on just introducing the basics of Kotlin using familiar Java examples, and exercises to practice Kotlin syntax.

Day 2: Developing an Android App with Kotlin

Day 2 was all about building a solid example app in Kotlin, which could be referred to later on. We came up with a wiki with task breakdowns to cover all of the exercises step-by-step. You can access them here: https://github.com/velos/SeasonalClone/wiki

We wanted each exercise to build upon the previous one, but at the same time be able to run independently.

The example we used came from a simple app we had recently released, called Seasonal, which is written entirely in Kotlin.

Feedback

During the event, the students were engaged, asked questions, and enjoyed working through the exercises! Afterwards, we asked for feedback, and here are a few quotes from the students:

“Pretty blown away. Was surprised the event wasn’t 100 people or so, but the quality turned out to be as good as better as Id expect for something with hundreds of attendees”

“Great value for the money, very educational.”

“It was good that, we learnt things and then we practiced them hands on, so we retain more knowledge”

Overall, we ended up getting great feedback on the workshop, and would love to host more like this in the future! Have ideas for workshops or tech-related events you’d like to see? Email us at info@velosmobile.com