Kotlin: Looking for Head of Marketing

Hello!

The time has come again when it is time for us to raise Kotlin's marketing to a new level. Why? In short, we have grown very much, and we have very big ambitions.

Today in marketing Kotlin works 2 (in words: two) people. It is obvious to all that this is very small. Their results are transcendental, but, first, they are sewn up, secondly, one of them decided to become an engineer again and move Machine Learning forward (on Kotlin, of course). Now we are looking for not just a marketer, but a person who can eventually assemble a team.

Generally speaking, we never looked for just a marketer. We need a person who will speak the same language with users. This means that it is necessary to understand developers, their needs and realities. You need to be able to play jokes for programmers, feel the fury of programmers and share their (our) joy. You need to understand why people who write code at work, on weekends and evenings write code in hobby projects all week long. The easiest way to achieve this is to write the code yourself / yourself. At least some time. It is possible on weekdays :) Experience in DevRel is clearly useful. The experience of speaking and / or organizing conferences, writing study materials, creating a community of developers is also (and what, actually, is DevRel?). And the experience of promoting ideas is very useful. Any ideas.

If you are interested in how such products are progressing, and especially if you want to accept such a challenge and come to work with us, read on.

A few words about Kotlin yesterday and today

First, I will tell you a little about the project itself, its history and market position.

As you probably know, Kotlin is a programming language. It is considered a “new” language; after release 1.0 a little less than three years have passed. We started development in 2010. So who is new and who has worked on it all his professional life :)

From the very beginning, we made Kotlin as a language for everyone: from beginners to experienced professionals. Our main motto: pragmatic language. We try to make a convenient tool for people (and not, for example, a mathematical abstraction).

Our first success happened in 2017, when Google announced Kotlin’s official support on the Android platform. The best part is that this was not the success of some business negotiations, but a request “from below”. The community of developers of mobile applications for Android around the world really loved our language and showered Google with questions about when it will be officially supported. Google thought for a year and decided it was a good idea :)

This year, the number of Kotlin users reached 2 million people, which is about three times more than last year. Kotlin is the fastest growing language on GitHub. And one of the most favorite languages according to StackOverflow . It is used by companies of all sizes and directions: from small startups like KeepSafe to Uber, Avito, leading banks and Microsoft. This is a result achieved in less than three years on the market. I personally am very proud of it.

We put a lot of effort into building a community: here is a list of 163 of our user groups. There are not only the countries leading the software industry, but also, for example, Uganda, Burkina Faso and Sri Lanka. And here is a list of 27 books about Kotlin, which managed to come out in the last three years. Only one of them was written by us. There are a lot of online courses and other educational materials created by the community.

In November, we held a KotlinConf conference in Amsterdam (the previous one was in San Francisco). She gathered 1,300 participants, tickets were sold out two months before the start. It turned out very cool. We will definitely continue.

What's next?

We quickly took a strong position in mobile development, but Kotlin is not a niche language. It is good for server development, for web clients, which adds up to full-stack web application development. We are actively working on supporting new platforms , primarily iOS.

But application types are just one of the dimensions. We are quite actively promoting modern concepts into the mainstream that make programmers more productive (and therefore happier). Korutin - the most courageous of such steps to date. This is a real cutting-edge, the most modern programming paradigm. In modern development, where is full of asynchronous calls and concurrency, without Corutin anywhere. And in Kotlin they are made very simply and flexibly. Users really like it. Me too :)

So this is a strategy: to win the sympathy of users in the hottest markets and promote modern ideas to the masses.

Why Kotlin marketing

Like other JetBrains products, Kotlin is a tool made by programmers for programmers. We ourselves use it a lot (“dogfudim”), communicate with users a lot, and in general we understand the needs of the market quite well.

abreslav listens to users at the Mobius 2018 conference in St. Petersburg

The product is well distributed “bottom-up”: developers convince their leaders to switch to Kotlin. “From top to bottom,” it goes pretty well too: companies are attracting tough engineers because they can write on Kotlin.

What should our marketer do? First, of course, help the process of spreading the language, guide and support it. Well inform existing users, attract new ones, work with the community. It is necessary that our site is the most understandable in the world and give answers to everyone who wants to learn something about the project or to somehow participate. It is necessary that active users talk about their experience to everyone, so that companies show case studies, etc. The usual thing.

But there is another side, one might say, philosophical. A programming language is not just a product, it is an idea (no pun intended). We not only give people a tool, they help them shape their thoughts in a certain way. We found some ways to express thoughts that work better than others, we help people to master them. And our marketing, of course, revolves around this: we promote ideas.

And all this needs to be done in different markets: from China to America, from mobile games to high-loaded servers, from students to managers in large companies. To each of these markets you need to bring those ideas that are important, understandable and interesting.

In general, it will not be boring.

Our goals

Here, in fact, everything is simple: we want to take over the world. Seriously.

We want Kotlin to become one of the five most popular languages ​​in the world for five years. This is a minimum program. We want the world's leading universities to teach Kotlin. We want, when someone decides to use some other language, he would be asked in surprise: why not Kotlin?

Well, how? Does it respond? Then come: https://spb.hh.ru/vacancy/28430182 or job@jetbrains.com .