My first encounter with programming was sometime around 1995 or 1996, with a Nixdorf-branded 80286 machine, Microsoft QuickBASIC for MS-DOS on a floppy disk, and a few pages on BASIC from a very old Soviet high school textbook. I didn't know that numbering every line was optional in modern BASIC, so my first programs were all line-numbered. The first program I wrote asked the user for a password in a loop until the hard-coded string matched the input. I didn't get it right from the first run, of course, and it looped forever. Oblivious of Ctrl+C, I could only Ctrl+Alt+Del, and all my precious code was lost. This is how I started learning the Ctrl+S reflex.

When I got my first Pentium computer around 1997 or so, my uncle gave me a book on Borland Delphi, and over the next 5-7 years, I learned every corner of the Object Pascal language, the VCL library (thanks for the sources, Borland!), and the Delphi integrated environment. I think Anders Heilsberg, the mastermind behind Delphi and many other great programming systems, may have influenced me the most as a language designer and programmer, although we never met in person and only had a brief email exchange in 2010 while I interned at Microsoft Research.

(I lost my original copy of this book, and finding another one proved rather difficult as it was published in 1995 and not in huge numbers. Long after I'd lost all hope, a friend gave it to me for the New Year's 2024. The warmest gift I got in years, I think)

It so happened that my first employer as a programmer was actually Borland, although I never worked on Delphi. Our team worked on Together for Eclipse, the UML tool. I was quite a bit into UML, metamodelling and Generative Programming stuff at the time. It took me some time to see through the hype, but generative programming naturally lead to Domain-Specific Languages  which I studied in-depth for a number of years, up until 2010 when I joined JetBrains to start Kotlin.

The name Kotlin did not exist for another year or so. The project was codenamed "Jet", and it can still be seen in the git history. The trademark "Jet" was taken, so we agonized over a new name up until almost the very deadline for the public announcement at JVM Language Summit in 2011. Dmitry Jemerov came up with the name Kotlin. It's an island in the Baltic Sea near Saint Petersburg, you couldn't quite see it from our office, but it was not far. We picked up on some inaccurate Wikipedia article of the time, and thought the word meant "kettle" in Swedish, that's why the early logo has a kettle in it. We also called it "Project Kotlin" to emphasize that it was just a code name that could be changed later. But nobody ever got around to reconsidering the name. Picking names is just too hard.

I represented JetBrains in the JSR 335 Expert Group led by Brian Goetz. It was a lot of fun and a great honor. We discussed the design of lambda expressions, SAM conversions, default methods, and method references for Java, as well as the corresponding library changes. 

The mailing list discussions were, perhaps, more important, but I enjoyed the in-person meetings in Santa Clara attached to the JVM Language Summit. A lot of insights from Brian Goetz, John Rose, Joshua Bloch, Doug Lea, and others. It surprised me at first how these very accomplished people treated me as an equal and seemed genuinely interested in hearing my opinions, and I try to follow their example.

Later, in 2018, when it turned out that Kotlin's idea of null safety was in high demand but there was little chance to get it into Java proper any time soon, we collaborated with folks over at Google (primarily, Kevin Bourillion and Kevin Bierhof, if memory serves) and started JSpecify. I'm happy to see that many companies, including Oracle, have joined this initiative over time.