Kotlin and Android Studio

Sometimes as programmers it is hard to show the results of even the smallest of our efforts unless we open up and IDE and show someone what we have been working on or how programming can solve their problem. I found a little more recognition after learning some of the Kotlin programming language and how to use android studio.

Recently a collogue of mine who is also attending OSU complained that he was unable to put in what if scores in the grades section of his class. After several minutes of watching him manually add up scores and attempt averages/weight ect. I was all but begging him to just let me write a program that would do it for him. He had his doubts at first but I insisted that it would be easier to figure out all the different values he wanted to test if I just wrote something for him.

It took less than a minute before I had a simple program with hard coded values that let him test different possibilities and potential what if scores. It was a quick problem-solving scenario aided by programming and he was grateful for the help.

But that interaction got me thinking, I’ve written several small useful programs for myself over the course of my study’s at OSU but I don’t really have anything that I can share with people. Sure, I can load up PyCharm or some other IDE or run an executable but that seems a little heavy handed when people are more comfortable with downloading an app within seconds and skipping all the hassle.

After some searching into android app development, I found that one of the preferred languages for android development was Kotlin. They have a light browser-based environment to try out the language on their website so you can see if you like it before downloading a compatible IDE.

Kotlin Playground

And I found and introductory course on the android website for using the Kotlin IDE for Mobil app programming. Some of the material is a bit basic but it does a really good job of breaking everything down step by step. Even though I hadn’t used the language before I found the transition much easier than my attempts at using Java.

Android Studio and Kotlin language course

I highly recommend looking into this course if you want to branch into app development or even just to make a more user-friendly version of a program that you have already written. I took a few days out of my spring break and came out of it with some Mobil programming experience and a custom app for a collogue. I’ll mark that down as a win in my book any day