Video and resources for the Update on IntelliJ IDEA talk from FOSDEM 2020.

Abstract

With releases of Java coming thick and fast every six months, it’s a full time job staying on top of the features. If your IDE can help you here, it’s one less thing to worry about. IntelliJ IDEA Community has three releases every year, each one improves the support for modern versions of Java, but that’s not the only thing on offer.

Join this session to see what’s new in IntelliJ IDEA Community (the free one!). This is not limited to just supporting new language features, which some of us might not get to use for ages, but better support for things developers do every day, and improved performance and stability, because an all-singing, all-dancing IDE is all well and good, but if it’s not usable those features mean nothing.

We should invest more time in the skill of reading code.

It’s exhausting staying up to date with the evolution of Java and the myriad other JVM languages. Is it worth it? What do modern languages give us?

How is Java 9 going to change the way developers work?

Looking ahead to what functionality is available in Java 9, and IntelliJ IDEA’s support (current and future) for it.

List of resources for those trying to make the switch from Eclipse to IntelliJ IDEA:

Apparently, I’m all about Continuous Learning - after I wrote the last post about IntelliJ Tips, I carried on through my trawl of the documentation and, of course, discovered a load more things I didn’t know. And this is all just in the Quick Start section!

So here’s the next batch (although once again I’m not sure how many are only applicable to IntelliJ 14). All shortcuts are for Windows unless otherwise stated, and Mac users should be able to replace the Ctrl key with Cmd in all these cases.

Day three of my brand new job - woohoo! One of my first tasks is checking the documentation of IntelliJ, since I’m already a “Power User”, to see if there’s stuff missing that someone like me might want to see. Firstly, a confession - I’m not sure I’ve actually read the IntelliJ documentation before. I mean, really read it. Of course, I’ve dipped into it when I needed to know something, I’ve searched for help with specific items, but like many developers, I tend to use something first rather than read the documentation first.

But I’ll tell you what, today I’ve learnt a whole bunch of useful things IntelliJ can do that I hadn’t previously known, and they’re the sorts of things you would only stumble over if a) you read the docs (pah!) or b) you watched someone else using the tool and saw them doing something you didn’t know was possible.

Just over two years ago, I embarked upon a journey as a developer / evangelist for a company who was then called 10gen (who got fed up of saying “the MongoDB people”, and transformed into MongoDB Inc). My goals for this role were: to learn what it was like working for a company that produced a technology product; to discover what impact working in an open source fashion has; and to level up my advocacy skills.