MAD Skills Kotlin and Jetpack: wrap-up

Posted by Florina Muntenescu, Developer Relations Engineer

We just wrapped up another series of MAD Skills videos and articles - this time on Kotlin and Jetpack. We covered different ways in which we made Android code more expressive and concise, safer, and easy to run asynchronous code with Kotlin.

Check out the episodes below to level up your Kotlin and Jetpack knowledge! Each episode covers a specific set of APIs, talking both about how to use the APIs but also showing how APIs work under the hood. All the episodes have accompanying blog posts and most of them link to either a sample or a codelab to make it easier to follow and dig deeper into the content. We also had a live Q&A featuring Jetpack and Kotlin engineers.

Episode 1 - Using KTX libraries

In this episode we looked at how you can make your Android and Jetpack coding easy, pleasant and Kotlin-idiomatic with Jetpack KTX extensions. Currently, more than 20 libraries have a KTX version. This episode covers some of the most important ones: core-ktx that provides idiomatic Kotlin functionality for APIs coming from the Android platform, plus a few Jetpack KTX libraries that allow us to have a better user experience when working with APIs like LiveData and ViewModel.

Check out the video or the article:

Episode 2 - Simplifying APIs with coroutines and Flow

Episode 2, covers how to simplify APIs using coroutines and Flow as well as how to build your own adapter using suspendCancellableCoroutine and callbackFlow APIs. To get hands-on with this topic, check out the Building a Kotlin extensions library codelab.

Watch the video or read the article:

Episode 3 - Using and testing Room Kotlin APIs

This episode opens the door to Room, peeking in to see how to create Room tables and databases in Kotlin and how to implement one-shot suspend operations like insert, and observable queries using Flow. When using coroutines and Flow, Room moves all the database operations onto the background thread for you. Check out the video or blog post to find out how to implement and test Room queries. For more hands-on work - check out the Room with a view codelab.

Episode 4 - Using WorkManager Kotlin APIs

Episode 4 makes your job easier with WorkManager, for scheduling asynchronous tasks for immediate or deferred execution that are expected to run even if the app is closed or the device restarts. In this episode we go over the basics of WorkManager and look a bit more in depth at the Kotlin APIs, like CoroutineWorker.

Find the video here and the article here, but nothing compares to practical experience so go through the WorkManager codelab.

Episode 5 - Community tip

Episode 5 is by Magda Miu - a Google Developer Expert on Android who shared her experience of leveraging foundational Kotlin APIs with CameraX. Check it out here:

Episode 6 - Live Q&A

In the final episode we launched into a live Q&A, hosted by Chet Haase, with guests Yigit Boyar - Architecture Components tech lead, David Winer - Kotlin product manager, and developer relations engineers Manuel Vivo and myself. We answered questions from you on YouTube, Twitter and elsewhere.