The full KotlinConf’26 schedule is finally live, and it’s packed!
With parallel tracks, deep-dive sessions, and back-to-back talks, planning your time can feel overwhelming. When almost every session looks interesting, deciding where to spend your time isn’t easy.
To help you navigate it all, the Kotlin team has selected a few talks worth adding to your list. Whether you’re an intermediate or advanced Kotlin developer looking to sharpen your expertise, part of a multiplatform team solving cross-platform challenges, building robust server-side systems, or exploring AI-powered applications in Kotlin, these are sessions you might want to check out.
Intermediate
These talks are perfect if you want to build on your foundations, understand where Kotlin is heading, and sharpen practical skills you can apply in your day-to-day work.
Michail Zarečenskij
Kotlin Lead Language Designer, JetBrains
Programming languages are shaped by their defaults – what’s safe, convenient, and practical. But defaults evolve, and yesterday’s good idea can become today’s source of friction. This session explores how languages rethink and change their defaults, including mutability, null-safety, and deeper object analysis. With examples from C#, Java, Swift, Dart, and Kotlin, you’ll gain insight into how Kotlin continues to evolve and what those changes mean for everyday development.
Adele Carpenter
Software Engineer, Trifork Amsterdam
Data is messy, and drawing the right conclusions takes more than generating a pretty chart. In this practical session, Adele will walk you through analyzing a real-world powerlifting dataset using Kotlin tools. You’ll explore how to understand and validate data, work with Postgres and DataFrame, and visualize results with Kandy – all directly from your IDE. It’s a hands-on introduction to doing thoughtful, reliable data science in Kotlin.
Modern terminals can do far more than print text. In this deep dive, Jake explores how command-line apps communicate with terminals – from colors and sizing to advanced features like frame sync, images, and keyboard events. Using Kotlin, he covers OS-specific APIs, JVM vs. Kotlin/Native challenges, and reusable libraries that help you unlock the full power of the terminal.
Huyen Tue Dao
Software Engineer, Netflix
Co-host, Android Faithful
Ten years after Kotlin 1.0, the language continues to evolve quickly. This talk examines recent stable and preview features, unpacking their design and implementation to reveal what they tell us about Kotlin’s direction. You’ll leave with a deeper understanding of how the language is shaped and how those insights can influence your own Kotlin code.
John O’Reilly
Software Engineer, Neat
This session explores how Koog can power the intelligent core of a Compose Multiplatform app. This session demonstrates building AI-driven applications using local tools across Android, iOS, and desktop, connecting to an MCP server with the Kotlin MCP SDK, and integrating both cloud and on-device LLMs. It’s a practical look at bringing full-stack AI into real Kotlin applications.
Advanced
Ready to go deeper? These sessions dive into compiler internals, language design, architecture, and performance, making them ideal for experienced developers who want to explore Kotlin beneath the surface.
Zac Sweers
Mobile Person, Kotlin
Metro is both a multiplatform DI framework and a sophisticated Kotlin compiler plugin. This advanced session breaks down how Metro works inside the compiler, what code it generates, and how its “magic” actually happens. If you’re comfortable with DI frameworks and curious about compiler-level mechanics, this is a rare behind-the-scenes look.
Ross Tate
Programming-Languages Researcher and Consultant
What if Kotlin could enforce that certain objects never escape their intended scope? This talk introduces a proposed design for enforceable locality – lightweight, limited-lifetime objects that prevent leaks and enable safer APIs. Beyond bug prevention, locality opens the door to advanced control patterns, effect-like behavior, and strong backwards compatibility, all while integrating cleanly into today’s Kotlin ecosystem.
Tadeas Kriz
Senior Kotlin Developer, Touchlab
Kotlin Multiplatform native builds come with a key constraint: one native binary per project. This session explores what happens when multiple binaries enter the picture, the architectural impact on large systems, and strategies for splitting compilation into manageable parts. It’s a practical look at scaling Kotlin/Native in complex, multi-repository environments.
Instead of showing how to use OkHttp, this talk opens it up. You’ll explore its interceptor-based architecture, connection lifecycle management, caching state machines, URL decoding, and performance optimizations. From generating HTTPS test certificates to extending the library in multiple ways, this session is a masterclass in reading and learning from high-quality Kotlin code.
Multiplatform
Kotlin Multiplatform continues to expand what’s possible across devices and platforms. These sessions showcase the latest advancements, real-world journeys, and forward-looking tooling shaping the cross-platform landscape.
Sebastian Aigner
Developer Advocate, JetBrains
Márton Braun
Developer Advocate, JetBrains
This session explores what’s new in Compose Multiplatform and how it continues to improve shared UI across iOS, web, desktop, and Android. You’ll get a hands-on look at recent platform advances, including faster rendering, improved input handling, richer iOS interop, web accessibility improvements, and a smoother developer experience with unified previews, mature Hot Reload, and a growing ecosystem. It’s a practical update on how Compose Multiplatform is becoming an even stronger choice for cross-platform UI.
Sergio Carrilho
TechLead, Sony
Go behind the scenes of Sony’s six-year journey from an early, risky experiment with Kotlin Multiplatform to the global success of the Sony | Sound Connect app. From high-speed BLE and background execution to migrating from React Native to Compose Multiplatform, this talk explores technical trade-offs, stakeholder skepticism, and hard-earned architectural lessons. It’s a real-world story of betting on KMP early and scaling it globally.
Pamela Hill
Developer Advocate, JetBrains
Swift Export aims to make calling shared Kotlin code from Swift more idiomatic and natural. This session looks at the current experimental state of Swift Export, demonstrates the transition from the old Objective-C bridge to the new approach, and highlights supported features, current limitations, and practical adoption guidance. By the end, you’ll be able to evaluate whether Swift Export is ready for your team.
Discover how Filament, a real-time physically-based rendering engine, can bring dynamic visual effects into your Compose Multiplatform UI. Through practical examples, you’ll explore materials, shaders, lighting, and touch-reactive animations – all without diving too deep into low-level graphics code. It’s a hands-on introduction to building expressive, animated interfaces.
Dan Kim
Engineering Manager
With Kotlin/Wasm reaching Beta and supported in modern browsers, full-stack Kotlin is closer than ever. This talk walks through building a complete web app using Kotlin/Wasm, Compose Multiplatform, Coroutines, Exposed, and Ktor – unifying the frontend, backend, and database in one ecosystem. It’s a practical guide to building performant, fully Kotlin-powered web applications.
Server-side
Kotlin is increasingly used to power large-scale backend systems. These talks explore how Kotlin powers high-performance systems, large migrations, and mission-critical platforms in the real world.
Alessio Della Motta
Senior Staff Software Engineer, Search Infra, Google
Discover how Google Search uses server-side Kotlin and coroutines to enable low-latency, highly asynchronous streaming code paths at massive scale. This session explores Qflow, a data-graph interface language connecting asynchronous definitions with Kotlin business logic, along with coroutine instrumentation for latency tracking and critical path analysis. It’s a deep look at building “asynchronous by default” systems at massive scale.
Ryan Ulep
Tech Lead, Developer Platform, Uber
Uber introduced Kotlin into its massive Java monorepo to modernize backend development without disrupting scale. This talk shares how the JVM Platform team built the business case, addressed tooling and static analysis gaps, overcame skepticism, and enabled thousands of engineers to adopt Kotlin. It’s a practical story of large-scale language evolution inside a global engineering organization.
Yuri Geronimus
Tech leader, Verifone
Adopting Kotlin in a payment platform is a strategic decision about risk, trust, and long-term ROI. This session examines how Kotlin was integrated into a global EMV/PCI ecosystem – from Android terminals to gateways – using null-safety, sealed hierarchies, and value classes to eliminate entire classes of production issues. You’ll see architectural outcomes, measurable compliance gains, and a practical framework for positioning Kotlin as a strategic bet in regulated industries.
AI
AI is rapidly becoming part of modern application development. If you’re exploring agents, LLM integrations, or AI-assisted coding, these sessions will give you both strategy and hands-on insight.
Urs Peter
Senior Software Engineer, JetBrains certified Kotlin Trainer
Agentic systems introduce probabilistic behavior and real risk. This talk introduces Eval-Driven Development (EDD), an engineering-first approach to making AI agents reliable. Using Koog, you’ll see how to test agents at multiple layers, collect meaningful metrics, detect regressions, generate synthetic test cases with LLMs, and build continuous evaluation loops that prevent silent degradation in production.
Vadim Briliantov
Technical Lead of Koog, JetBrains
Many AI agents fail when moving beyond demos. This session introduces Koog 1.0.0-RC and explains how its structured, type-safe architecture enables scalable, production-ready agents across JVM and KMP targets. You’ll explore cost control, strongly typed workflows, state persistence, observability with OpenTelemetry and Langfuse, and integrations across the Kotlin ecosystem – all focused on building agents that actually scale.
Sergei Rybalkin
Kotlin, Meta
Improving AI-generated Kotlin code requires more than better prompts. This talk explores practical strategies, evaluation techniques, and lessons from advancing Kotlin code generation in real-world agents. You’ll learn how to measure quality, refine outputs, and apply tools and best practices that ensure reliability, readability, and maintainability, even as models continue to evolve.
This is just a glimpse of the many great sessions waiting for you at KotlinConf’26. With dozens of talks across multiple tracks, the hardest part might simply be choosing which ones to attend. Don’t forget to dive into the full schedule, plan your agenda, and get ready for three days packed with ideas, insights, and conversations with the global Kotlin community.
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