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Often times ads are created that are funny OR product focused and informative. I questioned Slack’s strategy behind this piece of work: either Two posts ago The piece above speaks to the net value of the Slack’s product, but it does so in such a broad manner that, if you are not already familiar with the product and how it works, the spot does little to inform as to how the product is different from other products that claim to provide streamlined communications. Although Slack has achieved product market fit, it is under three years old and has not reached maximum scale. It strikes me as odd to that the company has created this type of ad as opposed to continuing to focus on specific benefits of the product in a very concise manner — and though I am all for an “above the line” approach where the goal is awareness, I think there are more effective ways to achieve this. Rather than taking creative inspiration from external factors that have nothing to do with the product (fake animals) it makes sense to look at the product itself and find inspiration from core features. Just because you are focused on core product, does not mean that you cannot be clever, funny or imaginative. Slack competitor HipChat uses the approach that I reference above: While their ad is just as entertaining as Slack’s, if not more so, it manages to highlight the functional reasons to use the product. It clearly shows what the product does and how it does it in a real like context. For growing companies looking for growth and adoption it is essential to keep communications as close to the product as possible as this is still the “education phase”. Large commodity products may need to create “cult of brand” through advertising that merely tells a story loosely related to the product itself, but more often these days it is critical to get people using your product and let the surprise and delight within the product itself do the storytelling (unless your product is rubbish, then you are screwed no matter what). Originally published at brandnewx.com on January 18, 2016.

Building Brand Awareness In The “Product Education” Phase

Me, trying to convince Android team to use Kotlin Nearly 2 years ago our team decided to try something new: develop a commercial application entirely in , a language by JetBrains. At that time, we had experience with Kotlin but on a much smaller scale: converting some parts of apps to a new language or trying it on pet projects. However, developing a commercial application in a new programming language introduces some difficulties: Kotlin programming We were deeply rooted in Java-based Android development. Switching to Kotlin was rather difficult, especially for developers without prior functional programming experience Some stuff just doesn’t work. Dagger did not work well from out of the box All that may lead to missed delivery dates and stability issues of the application. One should have strong incentives to make the transition. Our incentive was the belief that And that it’s Kotlin would be the game changer for the Android Platform development. Fun. Keeping the Kotlin reference open, we started to develop the Kotlin is a JVM language with 100% Java interoperability, and if you’re familiar with Java, learning Kotlin is easy. However, if you want to fully take advantage of the language, understanding functional programming concepts is essential. Voter application. Learning Functional Programming takes a while. So be patient. And Functional Programming is not easy. At least in the beginning. Until it becomes fun. I strongly advise to take a . Scala can be overwhelming at times, but it gives a great overview of the new functional programming mindset. You can treat Kotlin as a simpler version of Scala. set of courses by Martin Ordersky “Functional Programming in Scala” What made us turn to the Kotlin side Functional programming style Kotlin is 100% interoperable with Java. Also, Kotlin is a functional language. And the latter allows writing more elegant, expressive code. Function purity The concept of a pure function (a function that does not have side effects) is the most important functional concept which allowed us to greatly reduce code complexity and get rid of most mutable states. In Imperative Programming Languages such as Javascript, Java, and C#, Side Effects are everywhere. This makes debugging very difficult because a variable can be changed anywhere in your program. So when you have a bug because a variable is changed to the wrong value at the wrong time, where do you look? Everywhere? That’s not good. Note that how we manipulate data without changing its content. 2. Higher-order functions Higher-order Functions either take functions as parameters, return functions or both. Higher-order functions are everywhere. You just pass functions to collections to make code easy to read. reads like plain English. Isn’t it wonderful? titles.map { it.toUpperCase()} Let’s imagine a situation where we want to count the number of unread messages of different types. A typical approach would be: As you can see, as new requirements are introduced, the code becomes unreadable and unmanageable. Let’s see how we can solve this problem with higher-order functions: And we can imagine use cases where we would want to parametrize the function argument, let’s say, for calculating the product of unread messages. fold Another example of using higher-order functions is replacing numerous Listeners with simple higher-order function: BillingView : LinearLayout { var billingChangeListener: (() -> Unit)? = null... } ... // in an activity far, far awaybillingView.billingChangeListener { updateUI() } **3. Immutability**Immutability makes it easier to write, use and reason about the code (class invariant is established once and then unchanged). The internal state of your app components will be more consistent. Kotlin enforces immutability by introducing keyword as well as Kotlin collections, which are immutable by default. Once the or a collection is initialized, you can be sure about its validity. (See UPD for more accurate definition on keyword). val val val data class Address(val line1: String, val city: String) items = listOf(Address("242 5th St", "Los Angeles"),   Address("Dovzhenka St. 5", "Kiev")) val Null-safety This language feature made us think carefully about nullability of fields in our model classes. Previously, you were not sure whether field in DTO is initialized or not, @Nullable and @NotNull annotations helped, but not as much. Now, with Kotlin, you precisely know what field can be null, what field is are initialized later (e.g. fields injected by Dagger) and you get strict control over those fields. Result? Almost no . (Internally we call a “ ” operator, because it looks like a goose’s neck) NullPointerExceptions ?. goose brand?.let { badge.enabled = brand.isNewBadge }// Can also be written asbadge.enabled = brand?.isNewBadge?:false Anko Anko DSL is a great library which significantly simplifies working with views, threads, and android lifecycle. The Github description states that Anko is “Pleasant Android application development” and it truly proved to be so. Note that when is called inside Activity, the block will not execute if is . We do not actually use this feature, as RxJava handles all the threading in our apps, but it is a nice feature. uiThread isFinishing true . Although Anko is not ready to replace standard Android UI building, sometimes it is very handy. Using Anko instead of XML As you can see, Anko DSL allows you to use custom views alongside Android built-in views. This is where it has a great advantage over standard XML. Kotlin Android extensions: Removing ButterKnife dependency In Kotlin, you don’t need any of those. You can just reference your view property by its @id XML parameter, those properties would have the same name as declared in your XML file. More info can be found in . Bored yet? I bet you scrolled that without reading. official docs Other neat features Extension functions & Builders , , and extension functions can be easily used to create elegant builders. apply let **2. A quick hack for beginners**During the first couple of days, you often stumble upon a problem: you don’t know how to write a rather simple Java expression in Kotlin. A simple trick is to write a piece of code in Java and then paste it into a Kotlin file. Thanks to guys in JetBrains, it gets automatically converted to Kotlin. Hacky, but works like a charm! **3. Getting rid of unnecessary dependencies**Kotlin replaces a lot of third-party libraries, such as ButterKnife, Google Autovalue, Retrolambda, Lombok and some of the RxJava code. Summary As a software development team, the main challenge we have is delivering great products and being effective at getting the job done. Although to start developing effectively in Kotlin you need some prerequisite knowledge of functional programming, investing time to learn it really pays off. I believe Kotlin is a major improvement over conventional Android development, which allows us to deliver great apps on time, and with MUCH fewer bugs. Feel free to ask questions, we will be grad to help others make the transition. Share your thoughts / comments below! Programming is the most fun you can have with your clothes on. John Guttag UPD: _val_ does not actually mean ‘immutable’, but rather ‘read only’. See this article for details. This post was originally published at . Follow us for more articles on how to build great products 💪 UPTech Team blog References Kotlin Reference So You Want to be a Functional Programmer Why Functional Programming Matters 6 Benefits of Programming with Immutable Objects in Java Anko DSL vs Android XML-First Lessons from converting an app to 100% Kotlin . 99.8% crash-free users. Result: Voter Application Kotlin: val does not mean immutable, it just means readonly

Why we choose Kotlin for creating Android apps

I’m really excited to take part in this year’s . Thank you, , for all of the work you do with this and . FsAdvent Sergey F# Weekly Three disclaimers: I’m not a creative person, especially when it comes to naming things, so I’m stealing for this post. Stephen Diehl’s title Although I work for , I’m not writing this post on Microsoft’s behalf. All views things expressed here are my own views. Microsoft This is a long post split into three sections. I don’t have a TL;DR. 2017 has been a very exciting year for F#. To begin, F# has grown to be bigger than ever, at least as far as we can measure, through product telemetry, activity, GitHub activity, and F# Software Foundation activity. twitter Active unique users of F# we can measure are in the tens of thousands. Measured unique users of Visual Studio Code with this year, to become far larger than ever. Ionide increased by over 50% Measured unique users of who use F# i since last year to be larger than ever, despite quality issues earlier in the year that we believe have inhibited growth. Visual Studio ncreased by over 20% Much of the measured growth coincides with the release of , which has shown significant interest in the F# community. .NET Core 2.0 Telemetry is a complicated topic, and we do not try to account for existing users who are using F# in environments without telemetry, so it’s never perfect. usage of F# in the world is strictly higher than what we can measure. Actual But numbers and metrics are limited, because they tell only a small part of the story. I’ll attempt to summarize some of the major things that happened for F# this year. , most notably as the first version of the language with .NET Core support, and has had multiple updates since its initial release. F# 4.1 was released shipped , including support for . Visual Studio 2017 and its F# tooling five major updates .NET Core and .NET Standard projects Incredible members of the F# community, such as , , , , and others made significant improvements to our Visual Studio 2017 F# tooling including adding a dizzying array of features. Vasily Kirichenko Saul Rennison Anh-Dung Phan Steffen Forkmann F# is now installed into Visual Studio 2017 if you are installing .NET Core. by default F# tooling in Visual Studio 2017 now has a . nightly release channel launched, , and it has continually improved throughout the year. Visual Studio for Mac with F# support in-box now supports F#, with even better things coming soon. Azure Functions now supports F#. Azure Notebooks is now the official package for the F# core library. FSharp.Core is now the official place where the F# Compiler SDK is deployed, and is the recommended way to attain the SDK FSharp.Compiler.Tools . F# is now in-band with the .NET Core SDK We expanded our team and hired at the end of the year! Will The and repositories are now the official place for F# language and tooling evolution. F# language suggestions F# RFC , a plugin suite that turns Visual Studio Code into a fully-featured F# IDE, shipped at least 100 releases (or 200; jeez, it’s so many). Ionide , the awesome NuGet client used in many F# projects, seemingly shipped billions of releases this year. Paket shipped with excellent and ever-improving . JetBrains Rider F# support Much of the F# OSS ecosystem has migrated to and (which represents an incredible amount of work on the part of the maintainers). .NET Standard .NET Core and emerged as two dominant libraries to use when writing web services on .NET Core, with as a brilliant alternative that everyone should try out as well. Suave Giraffe Freya rapidly evolved from an interesting project with potential into an impressive and fully-fledged alternative for JavaScript in the browser, allowing you to write . Fable Full-Stack F# applications The (FSSF) has and become one of the best organizations to be a part of if you’re just beginning with F#. F# Software Foundation continued its steady growth The FSSF launched its and had another strong round of its free . diversity program mentorship program was created and sold out (quickly and despite low-key advertisement), which gets me all kinds of excited about F# in the U.S. OpenFSharp F# had a notable presence at , , . , and other Functional Programming conferences. //Build 2017 NDC conferences NET Conf Wew, that’s a lot. I probably missed some things that matter to people, so please let me know if you feel I should list something. If there’s a single thing I feel most when looking at the above list, it’s pride. Not just in myself or my immediate colleagues, but in the members of the F# community who have done so many incredible things across such a wide spectrum of the entire F# ecosystem. I’m American, and thus prone to superlatives, but you are all rock stars and I’m humbled to work with you all. Every single person involved in the above items should feel proud of themselves and their accomplishments. I’d also like to mention a few of the things that matter to me on a more personal level: I was one honored to be one of the announced at OpenFSharp: Community Heros I got to stay up until 3:30 a.m. after OpenFSharp talking all kinds of craziness over beers with , , , , , , , and . Mathias was kind enough to provide his apartment as the venue for these shenanigans. Rich Minerich Dmitry Morozov Gien Verschatse Mathias Brandewinder Chet Husk Cezary Wojcik Marnee Dearman Marcus Griep I got to hang out with , , , , , , , , , , , and others in Cambridge and London. Beer, food, taking over a bar, cavorting around each city, enjoying the sunshine, , and just about everything else happened. So much fun. Krzysztof Cieślak Tomas Petricek Evelina Gabasova Marcus Griep Riccardo Terrell Gien Verschatse Mark Gray Paulmichael Blasucci Enrico Sada Alfonso Garcia-Caro Jérémie Chassaing talking smack about Golang I got to witness the Pink Pezi himself, , steal ’ badge at F# eXchange, and then walk around calling himself a Greek programmer named Eirik. Ross, will there be an EirikTsarpalisProvider Type Provider library I can use some day? Will it only provide types named “Ross”, or will it also provide types named “Eirik”? Ross McKinlay Eirik Tsarpalis I was one of the honored few to be cow-herded, Don Syme style, by to leave the F# eXchange venue. Andrea Magnorsky Hup hup! I got to have pull me aside at F# eXchange for a wonderful and serious conversation about the sorts of things the community needed to hear from me at the conference and beyond. Oh, and she gave me a FunctionalCat sticker for my laptop, which I proudly display to this day! Andrea Magnorsky I got to meet , whose prolific blogging taught me why F# is so great when I was still a college student in 2014. Scott Wlaschin I got to watch launch Fable 1.0, code-named Narumi, and be honored to have him present not , but on Channel9 about Fable. Alfonso Garcia Caro once twice I got to hang out, multiple times, with some of the wonderful folks form while in London. G-Research I got to engage, daily, with to F# and its ecosystem. some of the amazing OSS contributors I got to have think numerous suggestions of mine were good ideas. For someone who only got a college degree in June 2015, that’s a pretty big deal me! Don Syme I think it’s rare to find a job in my field that is this rewarding. There is a lot of stress involved, and the problems that need solving and issues that need addressing are never simple. But it’s worth it every time. And now, for something entirely different. I don’t think I’ve ever clarified, for anyone in the F# community, what my precise role is at Microsoft. My title is currently “Program Manager II”, but that doesn’t really mean much. I’ll start with a list of things I’m : not Software Engineer. I’m a Program Manager! But I do sometimes write code for the product. Project manager. Nope nope nope nope nope. I’m terrible at process. Manager. Nobody works for me. Program. I’m a human, not a program. Evangelist. Nope. Although I sometimes do things that count as evangelism. Salesperson. You really don’t want me selling things to anyone. Data scientist. Not even close. But I sometimes use querying languages to muck about in the mud of telemetry systems. Product Manager. This is the closest, but it’s not the same as what other product managers do at other tech companies. I have some KPIs that I track, but I keep them low in number and tend not to focus too much on them. I’m actually quite fed up with the silly focus on marginally useful KPIs our industry has adopted, let alone the incorrect means that so many of them are derived and measured. Every action I take is to make sure that F# is a pleasure to work with and moving in the correct strategic direction so it will grow and flourish for years to come. That means a few things: There’s a good chance that for any given product or topic that is related to F# in some way, I have some context. The depth of that context may vary wildly. I help make a lot strategic and tactical decisions about what Microsoft does for F# with the resources it has. I spend a significant amount of time interacting with other teams at Microsoft. Sometimes, these interactions are merely giving someone context that they asked for. Other times, it’s a fully-fledged negotiation process, where we come to an understanding about who is responsible for the delivery and maintenance of assets under certain circumstances. I am responsible for some things that are not directly related to F#. Right now, this includes certain parts of Visual Studio 2017 setup and our organization’s efforts around Azure growth. The most recent, tangible result of this work has been to have F# be installed by default with Visual Studio whenever you install .NET Core. I am always advocating on behalf of F# developers when I am involved in discussions and decisions regarding .NET, Visual Studio, and Azure. My default position on things is if they would make sense to F# users. I am always learning more about our codebase, and I always strive to understand the moving parts at a high level so that I can describe them to anyone. The codebase is vast and dense, so there are things I am utterly clueless about. My hope is that by the end of 2018, I can contribute reliably to some of the “deeper” areas there. When I have the time, I evangelize F#, the tooling that Microsoft delivers for F#, and various F# open source projects. I hope to expand this effort moving forward. Finally, I am ultimately on the hook for the success of F#, Visual Studio users who use F#, Visual Studio for Mac users who use F#, Visual Studio Code and Ionide users who use F#, and Azure users who use F#. Although much of what I just listed are not my direct responsibility, my review at the end of the year depends on my involvement beyond the Visual F# tools which ship as a part of Visual Studio. This point is key: my role eclipses just the Visual F# tools which ship in Visual Studio. F# is so much more than just the assets Microsoft delivers in Visual Studio, and limiting my actions to just those would do a disservice to F# users. The holistic picture of the entire “F# experience” is what I care about and try to improve. And now, for something entirely different. I’m very excited about what 2018 will bring for F#. So many things in the F# ecosystem that were in flux in 2017 have calmed down and have been set up for success. These are some of my assorted thoughts on the coming year: I believe that F# will achieve the vision of being the best-tooled functional programming language on the planet, with excellent support in any IDE you like, excellent support in Azure, and the ability to use the tooling you want in the entire ALM experience. I believe that the F# community, especially through the F# Software Foundation, will continue to grow and become an active home for newcomers to the language. I believe that Fable will garner even larger interest in the JavaScript community than it has this year. I believe that F# on the server via .NET Core will be a compelling option for many people and organizations. I believe that F# will have an even stronger conference presence than 2017. I believe that the increase in F# OSS activity, .NET Core, and Fable will drive F# to new heights in terms of usage and activity. I’ll also share some of the things that I personally want to focus on in terms of what my team delivers: Finalizing Type Providers as .NET Standard 2.0 components. Delivering F# Interactive support for .NET Core, as a .NET Core application, accessible via on the command line, installed via a .NET CLI global tool. fsi Package management via in F# Interactive, running on .NET Core. #r “packagename" Completing the .NET Core SDK-based project support in Visual Studio 2017, including multi-targeting and file ordering, templates for Azure Functions and ASP.NET Core, and incorporating relevant templates from the community. Completing detailed performance analysis of the F# Compiler Service, with engineering work to address the findings. Continuing the F# 4.1 work towards better error messages. Working towards shipping a new language version. New and improved features, such as the ability to Go to Definition on types defined in metadata, or revamped autocompletion. I view the above as a fairly realistic set of things that you’ll all enjoy over the coming year. I’m quite hopeful that every one of these things will be something to brag about by next Christmas. 2018 is going to be an incredible year for F#. Until then!

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