



It’s kind of hard to believe, but we’ve been writing Kotlin at Basecamp for 20 months now! And with the first ever KotlinConf starting tomorrow, it felt like a good time to reflect on my time with Kotlin.

When I first started off with Kotlin, I was a bit…excitable. I was blown away by all the incredible things it could do. Compared to Java, it made my life so much easier and I was just much happier working with it. I was so excited to be learning this shiny new tech that I would tell anyone that would listen about all its wonders.

Now, almost two years in, things are different — in a good way.

The big thing is that I’m (mostly) past the initial “holy shit this is awesome” moments of discovery when you first come over from Java — finding out about all those crazy things you can’t do in Java, all the fantastic niceties that become your favorites, and all the little things that save you tons of time. Of course I’m still learning new stuff regularly, but for the most part I’m not running into any huge surprises day to day.

And so from that perspective Kotlin has become, well…uneventful. Wonderfully, lovably uneventful!

At its best Kotlin is extraordinarily reliable, unfussy, and pragmatic.

And while those words might not generate feelings of uncontainable excitement like I experienced at first, they paint an important picture of how awesome Kotlin is, deep down. They’re the things that really matter in a calm (and consequently a productive) work environment.

It’s awesome that the language is rock solid stable after upgrades. It’s awesome that every feature has been thoughtfully considered and prioritized against practical, real-world uses. It’s awesome that JetBrains dedicated 5+ years to get to a incredibly stable 1.0.

And it’s awesome that once you get the hang of it, Kotlin simply gets out of your way so you can get shit done, fast.

At this point in my Kotlin journey, my daily workflow is calm, peaceful, and productive because it’s uneventful. I may not be shout-from-the-rooftops excited about every little Kotlin feature anymore, but that’s OK. What really matters most to me is that Kotlin is a rock solid, stable foundation for my work now and in the future. And that’s worth a lot when shipping good work is the one true reliable measure of success.

Past and present aside, the future is bright too. The language is progressing at a fast clip (coroutines!), and the tooling around it is getting better every day. And perhaps most importantly, community involvement — blog posts, conference talks, Stack Overflow answers, and libraries — continues to expand rapidly too. These are exciting times!

I’ve had so much fun over the past couple of years building Android apps, and Kotlin’s been a big part of that. The progression from initial excitement to calm productivity to looking ahead at its bright future has been an absolute blast. I cannot wait to see what’s in store for us at KotlinConf and beyond!

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We’re hard at work making the Basecamp 3 Android app better every day (in Kotlin, of course). Check it out!