How Zalando Adopted Kotlin

We talked to Ole Sasse and Gregor Zeitlinger, Senior Engineers at
Zalando and leaders of their “Kotlin Guild”, about the weather in
Spain and Germany, but more importantly, about how Zalando has
successfully introduced Kotlin on the server-side. Ole and Gregor
talk about the way that Kotlin engineers organize themselves inside
Zalando, using their “Guild” model which allows engineers across
different teams to share knowledge with each other and learn about
new and more complex topics and libraries together. In addition to
Android and frontend, Zalando’s logistics department uses Kotlin to
build server-side microservices. We learned about the frameworks
their engineers use, including Spring and Ktor, and how Kotlin was
first introduced at Zalando and integrated seamlessly with their
pre-existing custom libraries, earning an “Adopt” spot in Zalando’s
Tech Radar (https://opensource.zalando.com/tech-radar/). Together,
we also tackled one of the classic questions about Kotlin: how do
you get people on board? Gregor shared his insights on the topic,
and how to get people to have their first “a-ha” moment with
Kotlin, and Ole chimed in with more information on convincing Scala
versus Java developers. We also learned why most teams using Kotlin
for the backend prefer to write their whole services in Kotlin
code, and saw the contrast with Zalando’s mobile application
development, among many other topics. Explore more about Kotlin and
Zalando: Zally, A minimalistic, simple-to-use API linter from
Zalando: https://github.com/zalando/zally “How we use Kotlin for
backend services at Zalando”:
https://engineering.zalando.com/posts/2021/07/kotlin-for-backend-services.html
Do Kotlin at Zalando:
https://jobs.zalando.com/en/jobs/?search=kotlin Zalando
Engineering: https://engineering.zalando.com/