Tag Archives: OSCON

Kotlin named Breakout Project of the Year at OSCON

Posted by Wojtek Kaliciński, Developer Advocate, Android

Stephanie on Stage with Kotlin on screen

Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson announces support for Kotlin during the Developer Keynote at I/O 2017.

Today at OSCON (the O'Reilly Open Source Software Conference), Kotlin was awarded the Open Source Award for Breakout Project of the Year.

There is no doubt to us why Kotlin received this award: it’s a fast moving (but thoughtfully developed) programming language that lets you write better code, faster. It’s great to see Kotlin continue to receive the sort of recognition as Breakout Project of the Year, building on other awards like #1 fastest growing language on Github.

We’re big fans of Kotlin, and we’ve heard that you are too – feedback from you is in part why we announced support for the language over two years ago. This meant bundling the Kotlin plugin in Android Studio, along with promising to support Kotlin-built apps going forward.

But there was a long way to go for many teams at Google to provide a first class experience with Kotlin in the Android ecosystem, and to convince developers that Kotlin on Android is not just a fad, but is here to stay.

If you haven’t tried Kotlin yet, now is a great time to start! In fact, in the past two years, we’ve been adding a number of new features and upgrades to the Kotlin for Android experience, including:

  • Android Jetpack APIs now have first class support for Kotlin Coroutines, transforming the way we do async operations on Android. This includes Room, LiveData, ViewModels, WorkManager and more coming in the future.

  • Many Jetpack libraries have Kotlin extension libraries (KTX) to make using them even more fluent with Kotlin.
  • The compilation toolchain has received many improvements for Kotlin, including compiler enhancements, incremental annotation processing with KAPT, and Kotlin-specific R8 optimizations.
  • All of our documentation pages now contain Kotlin code snippets, so you can easily compare how our APIs work in both languages.
Kotlin code snippet
  • Most of our flagship samples are also written in Kotlin (including IOSched, Plaid, Sunflower and many more), along with any new samples that we make in the future.
  • We've added a language switcher to our API reference pages, so you can have a Kotlin view of the AndroidX library and the Android framework.
Kotlin view of the AndroidX library
  • We doubled down on providing guidance to developers and teams who want to switch to Kotlin on our developers.android.com/kotlin pages.
  • Our Developer Relations engineers are posting real life examples and guides on integrating Kotlin in your apps on our Medium publication, such as the great intro to Coroutines on Android series and many more.
  • If you prefer to learn Kotlin in person, you can join one of the many Kotlin/Everywhere events happening around the world. If you are an organizer in a local developer community, consider signing up to host your own event!
    This initiative is a cooperation between JetBrains and Google.
  • For those of you who don't have access to in-person training, we added a new, free course on Udacity for Developing Android apps in Kotlin. Our Kotlin Bootcamp for Programmers course is still available as well!
  • We have worked with many external partners to gather feedback and learn about their experiences with Kotlin, such as this case study with Square.
  • And lastly, we've enabled Kotlin as a supported language for Android app teams at Google. We're already seeing adoption in apps such as Google Home, Google Drive, Android System UI, Nest, with many more to follow.

The road to fully supporting Kotlin on Android was not always easy, but it was truly rewarding seeing Kotlin adoption among professional Android developers rise from a handful of early adopters to around 50% since the original announcement!

We were confident when we announced earlier this year at Google I/O 2019 that Android is going increasingly Kotlin-first, opening up the possibility for APIs built specifically around Kotlin and for Kotlin users, starting with the new, declarative UI toolkit - Jetpack Compose (still in early development).

We want to congratulate JetBrains, our partners through the Kotlin Foundation and creators of Kotlin, on receiving the OSCON Open Source Award today. It shows how disruptive and transformative Kotlin has been, and not just for the Android developer community, but beyond.

We know one thing: on Android, Kotlin is here to stay.

Come Meet the Google Open Source Team at OSCON!

Google Cloud is proud to be a Diamond Sponsor at OSCON, and we’re excited for another year of connecting, learning, and sharing with the open source community! Google is deeply grateful to all of your amazing open source efforts, so to celebrate, our booth will have an Open Gratitude wall where we will acknowledge your contributions, and where we encourage you to express your gratitude for those who have helped you in open source!

Once you’ve recognized your open source heroes on the Open Gratitude wall, stick around at the Google Open Source booth to learn about topics such as open source governance, documentation, open source in ML and gaming, encouraging non-code contributions, and about Google’s open source outreach programs in general. At our booth sessions you can also explore open source projects such as Kubernetes, Istio, Go, and Beam (as well as other Apache projects). Booth office hours run from 10:15am to 7pm Wednesday, July 17, and from 10:15am to 4:10pm on Thursday, July 18. The full schedule will be posted at the booth—please come by and check it out!

In addition to the events at the booth, the Google open source team has two workshops on Tuesday, July 16:
This half-day workshop kicks off with an overview of research-backed documentation best practices. Andrew Chen, Erin McKean, and Aizhamal Nurmamat kyzy lead you through a hands-on exercise in which you'll create the skeleton of a ready-to-deploy documentation website for your open source project.
Paris Pittman takes you through the ins and outs of the Kubernetes contributor community so you can land your first PR. You'll learn about SIGs, the GitHub workflow, its automation and continuous integration (CI), setting up your dev environment, and much more. Stick around until the end, and you'll have time to work on your first PR with the help of current contributors.
We also hope you attend the main conference sessions presented by Googlers, especially the keynotes on Wednesday (Built to last: What Google and Microsoft have learned growing open source communities) and Thursday (Be a Docs Star), and the sessions on Wednesday:
And Thursday:
As part of our commitment to creating a diverse and inclusive community, we’ve redirected our conference swag budget into diversity scholarships. (We believe you’d prefer to have more interesting conversations with a wider range of people over another pair of socks!) But if you are looking for a souvenir of your time in Portland there will be a special Portland-themed sticker featuring Pancakes, the (extremely adorable) gRPC mascot, and we encourage projects to take and leave stickers in our sticker-swap space!

OSCON is one of the highlights of the year for those of us who love open source—we’re thrilled to be able to share what we’ve learned with you, and to learn what you’re interested in and excited about (and also what you think could improve). See you in Portland!

Googlers on the road: CLS and OSCON 2018

Next week a veritable who’s who of free and open source software luminaries, maintainers and developers will gather to celebrate the 20th annual OSCON and the 20th anniversary of the Open Source Definition. Naturally, the Google Open Source and Google Cloud teams will be there too!

Program chairs at OSCON 2017, left to right:
Rachel Roumeliotis, Kelsey Hightower, Scott Hanselman.
Photo used with permission from O'Reilly Media.
This year OSCON returns to Portland, Oregon and runs from July 16-19. As usual, it is preceded by the free-to-attend Community Leadership Summit on July 14-15.

If you’re curious about our outreach programs, our approach to open source, or any of the open source projects we’ve released, please find us! We’re eager to chat. You’ll find us and many other Googlers throughout the week on stage, in the expo hall, and at several special events that we’re running, including:
Here’s a rundown of the sessions we’re hosting this year:

Sunday, July 15th (Community Leadership Summit)

11:45am   Asking for time and/or money by Cat Allman

Monday, July 16th (Tutorials)

9:00am    Getting started with TensorFlow by Josh Gordon
1:30pm    Introduction to natural language processing with Python by Barbara Fusinska

Tuesday, July 17th (Tutorials)

9:00am    Istio Day opening remarks by Kelsey Hightower
9:00am    TensorFlow Day opening remarks by Edd Wilder-James
9:05am    Sailing to 1.0: Istio community update by April Nassi
9:05am    The state of TensorFlow by Sandeep Gupta
9:30am    Introduction to fairness in machine learning by Hallie Benjamin
9:55am    Farm to table: A TensorFlow story by Gunhan Gulsoy
11:00am  Hassle-free, scalable machine learning with Kubeflow by Barbara Fusinska
11:05am  Istio: Zero-trust communication security for production services by Samrat Ray, Tao Li, and Mak Ahmad
12:00pm  Project Magenta: Machine learning for music and art by Sherol Chen
1:35pm    Istio à la carte by Daniel Ciruli

Wednesday, July 18th (Sessions)

9:00am    Wednesday opening welcome by Kelsey Hightower
11:50am  Machine learning for continuous integration by Joseph Gregorio
1:45pm    Live-coding a beautiful, performant mobile app from scratch by Emily Fortuna and Matt Sullivan
2:35pm    Powering TensorFlow with big data using Apache Beam, Flink, and Spark by Holden Karau
5:25pm    Teaching the Next Generation to FLOSS by Josh Simmons

Thursday, July 19th (Sessions)

9:00am    Thursday opening welcome by Kelsey Hightower
9:40am    20 years later, open source is as important as ever by Sarah Novotny
11:50am  Google’s approach to distributed systems observability by Jaana B. Dogan
2:35pm    gRPC versus REST: Let the battle begin with Alex Borysov
5:05pm    Shenzhen Go: A visual Go environment for everybody, even professionals by Josh Deprez

We look forward to seeing you and the rest of the community there!

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source

Saddle up and meet us in Texas for OSCON 2017

Program chairs at OSCON 2016, left to right:
Kelsey Hightower, Scott Hanselman, Rachel Roumeliotis.
Photo used with permission from O'Reilly Media.
The Google Open Source team is getting ready to hit the road and join the open source panoply that is Open Source Convention (OSCON). This year the event runs May 8-11 in Austin, Texas and is preceded on May 6-7 by the free-to-attend Community Leadership Summit (CLS).

You’ll find our team and many other Googlers throughout the week on the program schedule and in the expo hall at booth #401. We’ve got a full rundown of our schedule below, but you can swing by the expo hall anytime to discuss Google Cloud Platform, our open source outreach programs, the projects we’ve open-sourced including Kubernetes, TensorFlow, gRPC, and even our recently released open source documentation.

Of course, you’ll also find our very own Kelsey Hightower everywhere since he is serving as one of three OSCON program chairs for the second year in a row.

Are you a student, educator, project maintainer, community leader, past or present participant in Google Summer of Code or Google Code-in? Join us for lunch at the Google Summer of Code table in the conference lunch area on Wednesday afternoon. We’ll discuss our outreach programs which help open source communities grow while providing students with real world software development experience. We’ll be updating this blog post and tweeting with details closer to the date.

Without further ado, here’s our schedule of events:

Monday, May 8th (Tutorials)

Tuesday, May 9th (Tutorials)

Wednesday, May 10th (Sessions)
12:30pm Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in lunch

Thursday, May 11th (Sessions)

We look forward to seeing you deep in the heart of Texas at OSCON 2017!

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source

Googlers on the road: OSCON 2016 in Austin

Developers and open source enthusiasts converge on Austin, Texas in just under two weeks for O’Reilly Media’s annual open source conference, OSCON, and the Community Leadership Summit (CLS) that precedes it. CLS runs May 14-15 at the Austin Convention Center followed by OSCON from May 16-19.

OSCON 2014 program chairs including Googler Sarah Novotny.
Photo licensed by O'Reilly Media under CC-BY-NC 2.0.

This year we have 10 Googlers hosting sessions covering topics including web development, machine learning, devops, astronomy and open source. A list of all of the talks hosted by Googlers alongside related events can be found below.

If you’re a student, educator, mentor, past or present participant in Google Summer of Code or Google Code-in, or just interested in learning more about the two programs, make sure to join us Monday evening for our Birds of a Feather session.

Have questions about Kubernetes, Google Summer of Code, open source at Google or just want to meet some Googlers? Stop by booth #307 in the Expo Hall.


Thursday, May 12th - GDG Austin
7:00pm   Google Developers Group Austin Meetup


Sunday, May 15th - Community Leadership Summit

Monday, May 16th
7:00pm   Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in Birds of a Feather


Tuesday, May 17th

Wednesday, May 18th

Thursday, May 19th
11:00am  Kubernetes hackathon at OSCON Contribute hosted by Brian Dorsey, Nikhil Jindal, Janet Kuo, Jeff Mendoza, John Mulhausen, Sarah Novotny, Terrence Ryan and Chao Xu
5:10pm    PANOPTES: Open source planet discovery by Jennifer Tong and Wilfred Gee

Haven’t registered for OSCON yet? You can knock 25% off the cost of registration by using discount code Google25, or attend parts of the event including our Birds of a Feather session for free by using discount code OSCON16XPO.

See you at OSCON!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office