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How to convince your manager to use Kotlin
This year’s #KotlinConf ’19 in Copenhagen has just ended. It was a great experience being part of it. Listening to the talks showed how fast Kotlin is moving from an “experimental” niche language right into the business world. You might have already heard that Google pushed Kotlin forward by making it the language of choice for Android development in 2017.
During the closing panel at #KotlinConf, people would line up at the microphones and were allowed to ask questions. The question that inspired this article is, as the title says, “How do I make a case that we should use Kotlin in backend development?” The person asking has previously worked with Kotlin. When he changed to a new job, there was no Kotlin, and obviously, nobody could convince their manager. There’s already plenty of excellent blog posts about this topic, like Philipp Hauer’s “Convincing Your Management to Introduce Kotlin.” While the articles I’ve found cover the technical side quite well, I find they are missing the point of how managers think. Hopefully, I can help you with that.
At Alphabrik, we’ve been using Kotlin in production since 2017. The most significant part of our software was written in Java. As the Head of Development, I asked our CTO to try Kotlin on a small and independent part of the project. By now, in late 2019, all our new microservices are solely written in…
