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Zan Markan
Zan Markan

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Surveying the State of Kotlin

I recently launched a survey exploring the State of Kotlin ecosystem, and the way developers around the 🌍 are picking it up. It’s one of the first projects I kicked off working as a developer evangelist at Pusher.
I invite you to help me in making it the greatest Kotlin survey ever!

Kotlin was created by JetBrains in 2011 to use in their IDEs and tooling. It quickly captured hearts and minds of developers in the Java and Android ecosystems, for its modern approach, and easy interoperability with Java. Since May 2017, it’s also officially been supported by Google for Android development.

Why we're doing this

  • First, I wanted to learn how developers use Kotlin, either at work or in their side projects, what got them into Kotlin, and resources they use for learning: talks, blogposts, books, courses, or something else entirely?
  • Secondly, I was interested in knowing how some of Kotlin’s most interesting features, like the coroutines and extension functions, are being adopted and used.

My inspiration was the State of JS, a brilliant resource for analysing the most popular features and tools in the JavaScript ecosystem. I was driven to do this survey by sheer curiosity, and wanting to give something back to the community.

We use Kotlin for all our new Android SDK development at Pusher - including Push Notifications, and Chatkit.
The Kotlin developer community is awesome 💯in providing valuable insight and forging best practices.

My plan is to release the results of the survey in a few weeks’ time - most likely in March. My hope for this survey is that it will help drive adoption in organisations and teams that are still undecided on whether to use it.

It gets better!

Win a trip to KotlinConf

We are also running a prize draw for the survey responders - a trip to KotlinConf organised by JetBrains (the brains behind the language) - in Amsterdam between 3 - 5 October 2018.

The prize includes a 🎟 conference ticket, ✈️ flights, and 🏨 accommodation in Amsterdam for the duration of the conference.

Bonus - nuggets from preliminary results

  • Android is huge, with over 80% of people answering they use it for Android. It should come to no surprise that over 40% of people started learning Kotlin after the Google I/O announcement in May 2017. 📈

  • People ❤️ null safety, extension functions, and data classes.

  • A quarter of responders believe that the use of K when naming tools and libraries should be kompulsory, while 11% disagree with that statement.

If you’re interested in Kotlin and invested in the community I invite you to enter the survey by following this link.
The survey will be open until 10 March 2018.

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