The speaker, Nicolas Frankel, gave a talk at FOSDEM conference about his experience with Kotlin, which he initially rejected but later started using for Android development and back-end development. He discussed features of Kotlin such as immutable references, null safety, and the ability to add methods directly to existing classes resulting in more object-oriented code. He demonstrates the use of reified generics with Spring and ends the talk with a brief mention of Apache API 6. There was also time for questions.