Software Engineering Radio is a podcast targeted at the professional software developer. The goal is to be a lasting educational resource, not a newscast. SE Radio covers all topics software engineering. Episodes are either tutorials on a specific topic, or an interview with a well-known character from the software engineering world. All SE Radio episodes are original content — we do not record conferences or talks given in other venues. Each episode comprises two speakers to ensure a lively listening experience. SE Radio is brought to you by the IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
SE Radio 682: Duncan McGregor and Nat Pryce on Refactoring from Java to Kotlin
Duncan McGregor and Nat Pryce, co-authors of Java to Kotlin: Refactoring Guidebook, speak with host Giovanni Asproni about their hands-on experiences migrating Java codebases. The episode starts by highlighting Kotlin’s seamless interoperability with Java, allowing teams to incrementally adopt Kotlin without disrupting existing Java code.
Duncan and Nat then describe some of the benefits of using Kotlin — including stronger type safety, non-nullable types, and better support for immutability — and some of the gotchas when refactoring from Java to Kotlin due to the different idioms supported by the two languages. Finally, they discuss the importance of testing and tooling, and the evolving role of AI-assisted tools in complex and large-scale refactorings — in the context of work done by teams, as opposed to individuals.
This episode is sponsored by Monday Dev