Case Study: How Unidata Uses WebStorm
Today we’d like to share with you how WebStorm is used by the UI team at Unidata, an IT company with offices in Russia, Germany, and Switzerland. Its main product, the Unidata platform, is a multifunctional solution for building corporate data management systems. On top of that, they have also built a couple of other tools for master data management and data governance. In 2019, the company released the community edition of its platform so as to contribute to open-source.
We spoke with Ruslan Trachuk, Chief Technology Officer at Unidata.
Hi Ruslan! Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at Unidata?
I’m responsible for all R&D-related activities in the company, including the development of the Unidata platform and other products built on top of it. I started my career as a Java software developer and I’m still trying to support the team and work with code on a daily basis.
What size is your team at Unidata?
We have over 25 software developers, 8 of which form a dedicated UI team, and all use WebStorm. Overall, we have more than 50 people working at the company.
What are some of the technologies your UI team works with on a daily basis?
Speaking of languages and frameworks, they use JavaScript and React and, of course, HTML, CSS, and SCSS. Besides that, they regularly use npm and ESLint.
Has your UI team always used WebStorm? If not, how did they end up with WebStorm?
We previously used Vim and VS Code. In fact, we’re really flexible in terms of tooling we use for work, so developers have always been free to choose tools they use on their laptops. At some point, they requested WebStorm as the best one on the market. Since then, it’s become the company standard.
Do you know why the UI team decided to stick with WebStorm?
I’d say that for us, WebStorm is like a Swiss Army knife. There is always a better tool for some particular scenario, but WebStorm seems to be the only all-in-one solution with robust support of all use cases a JavaScript developer can face on a daily basis. Besides that, it’s good-looking, stable, and feature-rich. Plus, we’re in the huge code refactoring process now, and WebStorm is second to none for that kind of task.
Can you elaborate on that huge refactoring process you’re in now?
We’re currently remodeling the entire architecture of our platform and reviewing the principles of how we organize our code. This is mainly driven by our decision to go open source and, partially, the need to update the technology stack for the UI interface. So, in a nutshell, we’re working on a new generation of our main product and it requires substantial effort from us. And a lot of code refactoring, of course. Our products constantly evolve, so we have to refactor large blocks of code regularly, with large-scale changes as we’re going through happening once in a few years. Right now we have about 200K LoC (Lines of Code), so it’s becoming more and more challenging. And yet, WebStorm helps us keep up with all of that.
We’d like to thank Ruslan and Unidata for taking part in this Q&A.
If you use WebStorm and feel like sharing your experience with us, please let us know by leaving a comment below.
The WebStorm team
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