Kotlin and Functional Programming & Reading Code

We are happy and proud to announce our next meetup!

This time we have two outstanding speakers. Marit van Dijk will discuss the benefits of deliberately practicing reading code and Urs Peter will explain how we should create code that our colleagues love to maintain and extend, for which FP should be a friend rather than a burden.

The meetup will be hosted by EDSN.

Please join us and RSVP!

Because of the limited number of seats, please keep your RSVP up-to-date, so we can welcome someone else of you can't make it.

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17:30 Doors open
18:00 Food & Drinks
19:00 Reading Code, by Marit van Dijk
20:00 Break
20:15 Kotlin & Functional Programming: pick the best, skip the rest by Urs Peter
21:15 Drinks

Giveaways
1 JetBrains licence

Talks

Reading Code

As developers, we spend a lot of time learning to write code, while spending little to no time learning to read code. Meanwhile, we often spend more time reading code than actually writing it. Shouldn’t we be spending at least the same amount of time and effort improving this skill? Deliberate practice can help us get better at reading code. Learning how to better read and understand code, can in turn teach us what makes code readable. This might even help us to write code that is easier to read.

In this talk we will discuss the benefits of deliberately practicing reading code in a code reading club or session without an IDE, as well as common strategies to navigate a new codebase and familiarise ourselves with the code using the IDE.

Kotlin & Functional Programming: pick the best, skip the rest

Applying Functional Programming practices in your code can quickly lead to heated debates: Hard-core FP advocates strive for the hegemony of 'functions everywhere,' whereas more conservative developers want to stay far away from the abstractions and complexity they add. The question is, who is right?

Drawing on my rich experience with FP, I will share my learnings with numerous teams I have led and coached over the years with the quest to unleash the potential FP offers while avoiding the pitfall of blindly proclaiming functions as the silver bullet to everything.

With many live-coded examples, we will explore the benefits of various functional concepts, ranging from basic higher-order functions, function composition, and Monads rigidly focusing on practical problems they solve rather than getting lost in academic considerations. Along the way, you will get a line-up of all the functional features Kotlin offers as well as the goodies functional libraries such as Arrow have in store.

Ultimately, we want to create code that our colleagues love to maintain and extend, for which FP should be a friend rather than a burden. At the end of this talk, you will have the recipe for accomplishing this quest.

Speakers

Marit van Dijk

Marit van Dijk is a software developer with 20 years of experience in different roles and companies. She is a Java Champion and works as a Developer Advocate at JetBrains. She loves building awesome software with amazing people and making developers lives better.

She enjoys learning new things as well as sharing knowledge on programming, software development, testing & test automation, and more. She has contributed to open-source projects like Cucumber and several other projects.

Marit speaks at international conferences, in webinars, and on podcasts, occasionally writes blog posts, and contributed to the book “97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know” (O’Reilly Media).

Urs Peter

Urs is a seasoned software engineer, solution architect, conference speaker, and trainer with over 20 years of experience in building resilient, scalable, and mission-critical systems, mostly involving Kotlin, Scala and Java.

Besides his job as a consultant, he is also a passionate trainer and author of a great variety of courses ranging from language courses for Kotlin and Scala to architectural trainings such as Microservices and Event-Driven Architectures.

As a people person by nature, he loves to share knowledge and inspire and get inspired by peers on meetups and conferences. Urs is a JetBrains certified Kotlin trainer.