Software Development Meet Up (Cork)

Cork is well known for its vibrant software developer community and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to attend numerous events and meet some very inspiring individuals. McKesson Cork recently sponsored one of these collaboration events organised by corkdev.io and I had the opportunity to present and give something back to the volunteers who make these communities possible.

The topic that I presented on was; “Kotlin on and off the JVM”, a technical discussion regarding the exciting possibilities of the programming language Kotlin, and plans JetBrains (the company behind the language) have for its future. In McKesson, we use Kotlin on a project to build a new generics sourcing application for one of our internal customers so I have first-hand experience using the language.

The presentation covered the following areas:

• A brief overview of the languages’ syntax (for the unfamiliar)
• What is the mission of Kotlin as a language?
• Kotlin running in the browser
• Kotlin running natively without the JVM (on iOS or IoT devices)
• Kotlin targeting Android
• Code sharing between all target platforms

All in all, the presentation was more a taster of the Kotlin ecosystem and generated a good deal of discussion regarding why one would take the plunge into Kotlin over using Java directly and as always with a discussion like this the inevitable debate regarding static versus dynamically typed languages.

These forums represent a great opportunity to share insights and get exposure to new technologies that we don’t all work with on a day to day basis. And of course, there was plenty of pizza!