Community Events Guest posts

Let’s talk about Developer Experience

Are you an engineer who cares about your developer experience and that of your team, company, or even the world? Do you have a lot of experience in improving development tools? Do you just see a lot of issues with the development tools in your company, and are looking for a place to discuss them?

At JetBrains we are focused on the developer experience (DX), so we came up with an idea to hold a series of meetups with like-minded experts around the world. We’d like to cover topics like development tools (IDEs, VCS, Code Review, and Automation), build tools, and CI/CD. If you’re as passionate about DX as we are and want to discuss these things and others, please join our Slack community here and share your experience, questions, and problems. All of the information about future meetups will be posted there.

First Meetup

Our first online meeting will be on December 20th at 5pm UTC/ 6pm CET / 9am PST. 

Add to Calendar: Google, Apple/Outlook

You can join the live stream on YouTube. Don’t forget to use the “Set Reminder” button to get a notification before the event so you don’t miss it. 

Let me introduce our speakers and their topics:

Krzysztof Romanowski from VirtusLab. He leads the Scala 3 team and has been involved with developer tooling for over 8 years.

When to hack and when to stop: lessons from the life of a ToolOps engineer.

“Finding the right balance between quality and getting things done defines an experienced developer. In other words, senior developers should know when to hack and when to stop (and to do things properly).

In this talk, I will share stories from projects I have worked on over the years and show whether my tricks paid off or were a constant source of problems. I will also discuss projects where a proper hack was the only way.”

Yan Zhulanow and Nikita Bobko from JetBrains. Both are developers on the Kotlin IDE plugin team.

From one monorepo to another: The story of Kotlin IDE plugin migration.

“This talk is about the migration of the Kotlin IDE plugin from one monorepo to another. Historically, the plugin had always been a part of the compiler repository. Some time ago, it became clear that moving the codebase closer to IntelliJ IDEA could make development a lot easier.

So a year and a half ago, we initiated the migration process, and it was a tough journey. As you can imagine, it wasn’t simply about moving the source files from one Git repository to another. We had to migrate from Gradle to IntelliJ Platform’s build system and improve our test infrastructure. Even after the migration, we had to keep up with both the Kotlin and IntelliJ Platform release cycles. It turned out to be the most challenging part of the story.

We will cover the technical problems we had during the migration, the solutions we chose for them, and how we managed to keep developing and releasing the product during such an infrastructure leap.”

How to Join

It’s simple – you can join us on Slack. Streaming links for future event announcements will be published there. We hope that it will be a good place for communicating with other like-minded community members. Also you can join the live stream on YouTube.

Your JetBrains Team

The Drive to Develop

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