Kotlin - The Whole Damn Family

For the February meetup, I am really excited to announce our special guest speaker - Garth Gilmour. He is coming down from Belfast to share his Kotlin expertise. Garth has vast experience delivering training across a large range of programming languages and technologies. Check out his bio below. Again special thanks to our sponsor, Teckro for providing the venue. Also a very special thanks to our other sponsor for this event, Instil https://instil.co/

TALK DETAILS:

Kotlin has seen rapid adoption over the last two years, and is now mainstream on the JVM. But that is only the start of the story. During 2018 Kotlin JS became a realistic option for browser based apps, with extensive support for building UI's in React. This year will see the emergence of Kotlin Native, enabling you to write programs that run outside of the JVM across a range of platforms. Best of all your common code can be managed via multiplatform projects and libraries, ending the duplication of type declarations in distributed systems. In this talk Garth will present examples of both Kotlin JS Web apps and Kotlin Native programs and talk about the stability, maturity and long term prospects for each.

SPEAKER - Garth Gilmour

Garth Gilmour gave up full time development back in 1999 to teach and mentor full time. Since then he's delivered well over a thousand courses and workshops to all kinds of programmers from all kinds of backgrounds. He started teaching C++ to C coders, then Java to C++ coders, then C# to Java coders and now teaches everything to everybody, but specialises in Kotlin. Although self employed for most of this career he came to roost six years ago as 'Head of Learning' at Instil. As part of that role he writes workshops (inc. a JetBrains certified Kotlin course), speaks frequently at meetups, presents at conferences and co-organises the Belfast BASH series of developer events. When not at the whiteboard he coaches Krav Maga, lifts heavy weights and fights nerf wars with his kids.