Kotlin's approach to packages and directory structure can feel Byzantine if you're coming from a language like Ruby. Unlike Ruby, where files are organized by convention and autoloading handles the rest, Kotlin requires explicit package declarations and a more structured directory layout. In this article, we look into how this all works and what the advantages are.

When an associate engineer and intern joined my team (see my previous post), one of the things I noticed had nothing to do with documentation or knowledge sharing. Something shifted in how the existing team showed up. The two new arrivals were visibly enthusiastic, curious, asking questions. And that turned out to contagious. Engineers who’d been heads down and fairly routine in their habits started engaging differently.

Earlier this year an associate engineer and an intern were added to my team. I am generally in favor of giving junior engineers the opportunity to learn and upskill themselves “on the job”, as it were, but it had a snowball effect on the team that I hadn’t fully anticipated.

This is a topic that I’ve been aiming to write about for a long time. It’s relevant to me because I’m in a tech leadership role, and have personally seen what works, seen what didn’t, and made most of the mistakes mentioned here at one time or another. And perhaps, because I happen to work at Culture Amp, a company whose bread and butter is the science of employee engagement and performance, I’ve become a bit of a “couch expert” on these topics, as well. At the same time, it’s not a topic I have often written about before, so I’m a little apprehensive about putting this series of posts out there. Having the courage to be vulnerable is a value I like to practice though: no more hedging, let’s get into it.

Kia ora! I am revamping my personal website after a long hiatus from blogging, starting out with a bit about me, and exhuming/republishing some (very) old blog posts of mine from an earlier incarnation of this site.

Lotico recently gave me the opportunity to run a webcast presentation about RDF4J, which you can find on Youtube: Eclipse RDF4J - Working with RDF in Java.