Moving to Kotlin

I am going to start a new job and my goal is to go Kotlin. I have been writing Android apps in Java for a number of years. Part of that time I also wrote iOS apps in ObjC. At the job I just left I only did Java Android programming.

I learned a lot at the job including ButterKnife, Dagger, Google Analytics, Flurry Analytics, Event Bus, Twillio, BrainTree, Timber, Vector Drawables, and Glide. All of those things make Java programming easier. I also used a number of things that I used at previous jobs including Volley, GSON, AndroidSVG, and  Google Play Services.

Now it is time to move forward into the land of Kotlin. I have been using it for a number of smaller command line utilities. I had used Python for things like that in the past and I found I can whip them out just as quickly in Kotlin plus it let me learn a new language that I could also use for Android.

I then stepped up and converted a small app that I had done in Java to Kotlin using the Anko library and then I wrote an animation test program from scratch from Kotlin using XML for the layout. Gave me a good peek into a number of aspects of Kotlin. I learned how to setup Kotlin for Android. My utilities were done with IntelliJ.

The old company was moving away from native development so there was not desire there to change to a new native language even if we did it bits and pieces at a time. Sure there was no harm doing some one off utilities but no way I was going to get Kotlin into the main apps.

Next up was taking some time to learn what libraries I might be able to use with Kotlin. There was an excellent talk by Jake Wharton about Okio. It started from the base of the pyramid and worked all the way up through OkHTTP, Moshi and Retrofit. Gave me a great understanding of the entire tree and what it is much better than NIO. Excited to use this chain of tools and to get away from the massive boilerplate of Volley when making REST calls. Annotations are your friend.

Don't know if I will use DSL and Anko but I might use the SQLite aspects of it. I like some of what it offers but also like seeing the preview of my layouts in XML. I do plan on using ConstraintLayout as I have used MigLayout for Java desktop and Autolayout for iOS so I think I can pick it up pretty quickly. I can pull off all kinds of things with RelativeLayout, LinearLayout, TableLayout, GridLayout and PercentLayout bit it seems silly to keep mixing all those together.

Scary to make all these changes at the same time. Kotlin will have me looking up how to do some things I already know to do easily in Java and general syntax. I have a decent base of knowledge now but I will probably fall back into old habits for speed. I know there is a lot of new syntax to use with Kotlin. Of course working code is what counts, using every trick may tighten up the code but is not a requirement. As I learn more I am sure I will go back to fairly fresh code and update it. Refactoring as you learn is a good idea.

I have watched enough Kotlin videos to know what bits and pieces are there so I will attempt to use as much as I have learned. I also think the iOS code written in Swift by the current developer will help me make the switch as it has a lot of the same programming patterns used by Kotlin.

Having a solid Android understanding is huge. I already know what I can do in Android, know about Activity and Fragment life cycles, know what the various Views do and can do recycler views with multiple row types. It will be more about learning syntax of a language and how to tie things together using Kotlin patterns.

Nervous and excited for this new life adventure. Not going to miss the old semicolon and constant null pointer checks. Will take a little bit but I bet my programming speed increases and I actually end up writing less code than I have been writing in Java.