How two junior Intuit engineers helped their team adopt Kotlin within a month

Change might feel like a natural part of working in the software industry. But in truth it's not natural at all; it takes a hell of a lot of effort to do things differently. That's what software developers Shelby Cohen and Katie Levy found out when they decided that Kotlin could be a better programming language option when it came to their company's engineering team.

As two relatively junior developers at financial software provider Intuit, Shelby and Katie didn't only have to take on the challenge of building out training programs and providing resources to thousands of developers across Intuit, they also had to negotiate internal hierarchies and politics that can prove resistant to change. To learn more about what this process was like, as well as why they're so passionate about Kotlin, I spoke to them over email.

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How did you get started in software engineering?

Shelby Cohen: I’ve always been interested in solving problems and engaging with new challenges. In high school I really enjoyed math and one of my math teachers encouraged me to join the High School Robotics Club. It was all men and I didn’t feel like I fit in. With the help and encouragement of my teacher I helped start the Women Robotics Club at my high school. This is where I was exposed to programming for the first time and that inspired me to study computer science in college. During my junior year, I learned about Intuit’s co-op program at a hackathon and thought it was a great opportunity. I then travelled from New York to San Diego to spend a semester working at Intuit. I learned so much and was exposed to a lot of mentorship opportunities which led to me accepting a full time position as a Software Engineer I in 2017. Intuit really values teaching their employees and helping them continue to grow and develop so it felt like a natural fit.

Why Kotlin? What’s unique about Kotlin?

Katie Levy: Kotlin is an open source, cross-platform programming language, designed to interoperate with Java. What’s nice about it is that it allows for an easy transition to start using a functional programming style while also being safer and more concise than Java code. Kotlin is unique because it is very clean, simple, clear and removes a lot of the redundant, boilerplate code that’s in Java which allows the developer to focus on the business logic. It’s my favorite language to program in as I can write high quality code faster by using its built-in language features. It can be used on any application running on the JVM, including Spring boot backend services, Android apps, and even JavaScript applications.

How/where did you learn about it? Was it an immediate thing or did it take time for you to decide to do this?

Shelby: I volunteered at KotlinConf back in 2018, and it was such a great opportunity to meet a lot of the engineers and staff from Jetbrains. I got to meet a senior executive at Jetbrains and shared some of the projects I was working on at Intuit. He asked to be a guest on his podcast, TalkingKotlin, and through this conference I got to know some of the most influential people in the Kotlin community.

How did people respond? Were they resistant to something new?

Katie: My team was definitely hesitant to start learning the language. One of the engineers on my team was especially resistant and tried to identify flaws in the language, using anything he could come up with as a reason why we shouldn’t use Kotlin. In those cases it’s important to identify the real issue the engineers are having with the new language — is it the language itself or is it something else? With that particular engineer, I found out that he was feeling like he didn’t have the bandwidth to take on the work he was being assigned. To combat this, I created a training program for the team so we could learn together, build up the team’s domain knowledge on the language, and so everyone’s workload was more visible.

How did you go about driving adoption?

Katie: Influencing and driving change is a hard project to scope. It can mean many different things to different people. For us, when we were starting out, we wanted to introduce 500 engineers to Kotlin, and wanted 90% of them to start coding in Kotlin. We ended up exceeding our goal, reaching 370 engineers internal to Intuit and 4,329 external to Intuit. We want to improve the industry by encouraging engineers to develop in a more concise and less error-prone language. More recently, we were able to present on Kotlin to over 500 software engineers at LambdaWorld in Spain. Afterward, we had engineers wanting to take pictures with us and all saying they want to start using the language. We found that speaking at conferences helped us meet our goals, and scale our efforts.

What were the challenges?

Shelby: In addition to some of the initial resistance, one of the biggest challenges is the internal hierarchy. When I introduced Kotlin to my team, a lot of engineers were more senior than me and at the time, I wasn’t confident about the value that I was bringing to the team. I implemented group code reviews, sent out resources, and walked the team through examples as they were learning Kotlin. Once the team had a good foundation for Kotlin, I implemented a flatter teaching structure and encouraged everyone to learn and teach each other a specific part of the language. This was really effective because everyone learns from different teaching styles and team members felt more empowered in their work.

Have you learned anything else about Kotlin throughout the process? And about engineering in general?

Shelby: One of the most valuable things I learned from this experience is don’t be afraid to ask for advice on how to influence at scale and connect with others who have driven change at your company. This way you can learn from other’s experiences. Katie and I reached out to a lot of leaders making an impact in their area of expertise to learn from them and get feedback and advice on our journey. This is something we will continue to do as we keep learning and facing other challenging problems.

Thanks to Shelby and Katie for talking to us - it's clear they have a lot of passion for Kotlin, but more importantly they also have a great sense of how to engage and support other developers.

Follow Shelby on Twitter: @shelbyc0hen

Follow Katie on Twitter: @klevy110