Kodee’s Kotlin Roundup: Birthday Wishes, Shipaton 2026, and the New Kotlin AI Benchmark

This one is close to my heart – Kotlin recently turned 15! To mark the milestone, we're inviting the whole community to celebrate. You can create a birthday postcard, upload a photo to party with me, and share a wish or a prediction for Kotlin's next chapter. Now is the perfect moment to look back at how far we've come – and to look ahead together.

Already know Kotlin? RevenueCat Shipaton 2026 is the perfect opportunity to turn your Kotlin skills into a new app. From August 1 to September 30, build and ship for Android, iOS, desktop, or web and compete for the Ship Kotlin Everywhere Award. Use the KMP starter guide to get your project up and running. To earn bonus points, you can help others by sharing your development journey. Shipping is impressive, but helping someone else is even better.

Kotlin now has its very own public benchmark for AI coding agents. It ranks agents on 105 real engineering tasks drawn from open-source Kotlin repositories, so you can compare them by resolution rate, token cost, and latency – and dig into the methodology behind the numbers. As AI becomes a bigger part of coding in Kotlin, I love that we finally have an open, Kotlin-specific way to measure what actually works.

July brought the Kotlin 2.4.10 bug fix release, alongside Kotlin Kotlin 2.4.20-Beta2 with coroutine stack trace recovery, faster klib compilation, expanded Swift export, and an experimental compiler native image. Try the Beta version and share your feedback while the release is still taking shape.

Kotlin support is now available in BlueJ 6.0 thanks to a collaboration between JetBrains and the BlueJ team at King's College London. Students can create, edit, compile, and run Kotlin code, inspect class diagrams, and interact with objects through BlueJ's familiar workflow. For educators, a new onboarding guide and ready-to-use materials make it easier to include Kotlin's concise syntax and null safety in introductory object-oriented programming courses.

The first Golden Kodee Community Awards recognized Matheus Leandro Ferreira, Jaewoong Eum, Nicole Terc, Eeva-Jonna Panula, and Yinlong Liu for their contributions to education, online presence, creativity, positive societal impact, and in-person community building. Read their interviews and watch the video to discover practical advice on learning in public, starting small, and helping the community grow.

The free LinkedIn Connected Apps plugin lets you connect a supported JetBrains IDE to your LinkedIn profile. Once connected, a profile statement highlights how you use your IDE in practice, based on usage data that stays on your machine. As your development habits evolve, the statement updates automatically to reflect your experience. It is designed to showcase practical tool usage – not to rank developers or replace formal certification.

I didn't always look like this! My journey began with a simple robot-inspired concept. Then, with the help of research, creativity, and community feedback, I evolved into the Kodee you know and love today. Check out my origin story (including how I got my name!).