Gradle Without The Guesswork: A Guide for Kotlin Developers

For many Kotlin developers, Gradle is a mysterious black box - a tool that somehow builds their app. On good days, it just works. On bad days, it becomes a source of endless frustration: trial-and-error, copy-pasting from Stack Overflow, and, more recently, help from our AI overlords.

But what if it didn’t have to be this way? What if just a bit of foundational knowledge could make Gradle feel far less intimidating - and maybe even empowering? That’s the goal of this talk.

This talk aims to demystify Gradle by giving you a practical understanding of its core concepts. We’ll cover:

- What Gradle actually does during a build
- How to debug Gradle scripts and plugins
- Lazy configuration and the configuration cache (and how not to break them)

You’ll also get concrete tips on how to keep learning Gradle without getting overwhelmed.