Speakers

Alejandro Serrano Mena is a passionate advocate of programming language design, formal methods and functional programming in software development. He works as researcher in the Kotlin Language Evolution team at JetBrains and helps co-maintain the Arrow library. He enjoys not only using and improving those tools, but also spreading the word: he’s written four books targeting different levels, regularly gives talks in conferences and meetups.

For quite some time Alejandro was an academic, working on the area of compilers and type systems for functional languages. His PhD thesis versed over error messages, and he’s been involved in efforts like improving GHC’s support for impredicativity. This knowledge is put in practice in several open source projects, many of them using metaprogramming techniques or compiler extensions.

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Adopting Kotlin isn’t just a technical decision—it’s a team journey. In this talk, Brent and Jonathan will share why they chose Kotlin—highlighting cleaner syntax, built-in null-safety, and embracing immutability—and how they approached management to make the case successfully.

They’ll discuss the key decisions they made: keeping existing Java untouched initially, avoiding overly complex setups, and ensuring the entire team was onboard. They’ll briefly explore their initial setup with Gradle, handling mixed Kotlin and Java modules, and navigating Spring Boot integrations.

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Dmitry Kandalov has been programming since DOS times. He spent the last 20 years or so in Java lands most recently working with server-side Kotlin. Dmitry is an experienced software developer with a passion for exploring different approaches to common programming challenges. He has extensive experience with Kotlin and functional programming paradigms.

His talk will guide you through various error handling strategies, from basic approaches to more advanced functional programming techniques, helping you make informed decisions about the most appropriate error handling approach for your specific use case.

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Duncan has been a professional software developer for over 30 years now. He was lucky enough to be an early adopter of Object Oriented programming, which was the gateway drug to patterns and Extreme Programming, and more recently functional programming in Kotlin. These days he still writes code for a living, coauthored Java to Kotlin: A Refactoring Guidebook, is a Google Developer Expert, and publishes a weekly YouTube video on Kotlin.

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Ivan loves code and dislikes magic. He discovered Kotlin in 2017 while writing a client-side API that would be duplicated between the JVM and JS and evaluating different multiplatform solutions. He’s been active in the Kotlin ecosystem through the forums and the OpenSavvy organization, focusing on creating libraries for Kotlin Multiplatform, especially for server-side and JS targets.

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Simon Vergauwen is a JetBrains Developer Advocate and one of the core maintainers of Arrow Kt, a popular functional programming library for Kotlin. With a passion for type-safe, declarative programming, Simon has been instrumental in developing Arrow’s core features and promoting functional programming patterns in the Kotlin ecosystem.

He regularly speaks at conferences about functional programming concepts and how they can be applied in real-world Kotlin applications to improve code quality and reduce bugs.

Maria Tigina started her career at JetBrains as an ML Researcher in the AI Agents and Planning research lab, where she studied local agent capabilities and developed benchmarks and evaluation methods for agentic systems. About half a year ago, she joined the newly created Koog team and continued her journey as a Software Developer for the AI Agents Framework, also taking on support for the Kotlin MCP sdk. Combining both her research and development expertise, Maria is passionate about building and improving new agents for JetBrains and beyond.

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