2018 summary
Kotliners,
We would like to thank you all for being with us. 2018 was a great year for
Kt. Academy! We transformed into recognizable company conducting workshops worldwide. Our publication on medium grew to have more than 5000 followers and more than 40 000 views monthly. This is important for us since our mission is to teach Kotlin. To share knowledge with even more people, we also have been working through this year on the Effective Kotlin book. We are going to publish it in 2019. Let’s make a small recap of this year.
At the beginning of this year, we were still publishing Kotlin Programmer Dictionary and articles about multiplatform development. We had a great series, Mocking is not rocket science, by Oleksiy Pylypenko, the creator of MockK. We made a series of articles about The character of Kotlin, and we published a very well received article, Dependency Injection: the pattern without the framework by Jean-Michel Fayard. He later published How Kotlin makes editing your Gradle build less frustrating. We also started sharing puzzlers on Kt. Academy.
In March we started publishing Effective Kotlin series, and each article was very enthusiastically received. We are very glad for discussions and comments. We published two articles by David Blanc: A few facts about Companion objects, and later Lambda mixup.
In April we got in touch with another great author, Allan Caine, who authored Living without Null, Kotlin’s Nothing: Its Usefulness in Generics, and later The Perils of Inheritance. In the same month Igor Wojda, coauthor of Android Development in Kotlin, published Kotlin: should I define Function or Property?. We also had an article by Jarosław Michalik: Parametrized tests with Spek. Just in April, we published 11 articles!
The most significant success of May was the Kotlin Cheat Sheet. Many developers downloaded it, and we got voices that it is used worldwide. It also helps participants in our workshops. We also had two articles about generics: Understanding Kotlin limitations for type parameter positions and Generics exercise from advanced Kotlin workshop. Then we touched an interesting subject of traits in Inheritance, composition, delegation, and traits and of data scrapping in Your first Selenium data scraper in Kotlin.
We started doing podcasts! First one was with Andrey Breslav — the lead language designer of Kotlin programming language, and another one with Hadi Hariri — VP of Developer Advocacy @ JetBrains. Podcasts are doing well. Now we have another podcast recorded, and we will publish it in next weeks.
We announced that we are looking for Effective Kotlin reviewers and we had over 300 submissions. Then we decided to make some fundamental changes in this book, and so we haven’t yet started this Early Access Program. Though finally, we are getting ready to start the program soon.
The founder of Kt. Academy, Marcin Moskała, has spoken on KotlinConf. He also helped with KotlinConf application. His tweets about Kotlin were warmly received, so we published them also in articles on medium: Awesome and crazy Kotlin examples and Kotlin fun and education on Twitter.
We changed our name from Kotlin Academy to Kt. Academy and we built our website on the www.kt.academy domain. We made amazing materials for our workshops.
We finished this year with the Advent of Kotlin, where developers took the challenge of solving difficult Kotlin programming problems in a week. Special congratulations to participants who solved all the challenges!
We are very satisfied with our development during this year. We transformed into one of the biggest Kotlin educators. The constant demand for workshops allowed us to share our knowledge and experience with a lot of developers, and to polish our teaching skills and workshop materials.
I believe that 2019 will be even better for Kt. Academy, because we work hard to share knowledge and we have lots of ideas for new activities. Apart from workshops, articles on medium, and presentations on conferences, we are also planning events for the Kotlin community — In February we are organizing Kotlin Night in Warsaw. Till now we did workshops mainly for the companies, but many of you asked about a workshop for one person so in 2019 we want to organize an online workshop that everybody can join. Other ideas? Coming soon! To be up to date with our activities in 2019 follows as on Twitter or join our newsletter.
Thank you for being with us and supporting us. You make it all possible.
All the best in the coming new year,
Marcin Moskała and Kt. Academy team
