Lectures

In this lecture, you will learn how a programmer’s career is built: from the first steps to the Senior level, what salaries exist in the industry, how to choose a development direction, what career tracks exist, and why programmers are often happy and in demand. The material will help you understand how to plan your professional growth and what you can realistically achieve in 5 years in IT.

We break down the when ( value ) construct as a more readable alternative to a long if/ else if chain: the basic branch syntax with the -> operator, the role of the else branch, {... } blocks inside branches, top-to-bottom matching order, and a practical example of a console menu with safe input parsing via toIntOrNull(), early exit using return, and retrying input with continue.

We break down how to use when in Kotlin specifically as an expression: assign the result to a val, return a value from a fun, watch exhaustiveness (why you almost always need else), understand what a block-branch returns and why println inside branches can lead to Unit. We also look at practical cases: “dictionary-like” functions, handling null for Int ? via toIntOrNull, and an example without else for Boolean.

We break down how to use when for validation and data classification: checks with in and ! in, ranges a .. b (for Int and Char), grouping values with commas, “early guarding” against garbage input, and why branch order in when matters. At the end: a cheat sheet, a mermaid diagram of the validation pipeline, and common beginner mistakes.

We break down how to build a simple CLI command dispatcher in Kotlin with when: why to normalize input with trim() and lowercase(), how to handle an empty string separately ( isEmpty()), how to manually split “command + argument” using indexOf and substring, and how to safely parse numbers with toIntOrNull(). At the end, we assemble a mini project “Wallet v0” and lock in typical mistakes.

We break down why when sometimes turns into a source of bugs: overlapping conditions and dependence on branch order, correct work with else (statement vs expression and exhaustiveness), and also how to keep branches short and turn command dispatching into a neat “table”. We show practice with examples of range validation ( in/ ! in), command parsing, and a mini input-processing pipeline.

In this article, you’ll learn how artificial intelligence has transformed the IT job market: why the biggest corporations are fighting for AI talent, what kinds of compensation top specialists are being offered, how the role of universities and open source is changing, and what it means for everyday programmers. Welcome to a new era where brains are the most expensive currency!