Case Study: How IT Manufactory Uses JetBrains IDEs

Ekaterina Ryabukha

Today we’d like to share with you how WebStorm and IntelliJ IDEA are used at IT Manufactory. It’s an IT company primarily focused on providing solutions for the automotive industry. Its main product, Digital Automotive, is a platform for strategy, acquisition, finance, change, and claim management.

We spoke with Varij Kapil, one of the software developers at IT Manufactory.

Hi Varij! Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at IT Manufactory?

I’m responsible for the development and architecture of our product, Digital Automotive. I started out as an iOS application developer and gradually entered the field of enterprise web development with Java and React. I’m currently involved in the development of both web and mobile applications for our platform.

What size is your team at IT Manufactory, and how large is the company?

We have 9 developers in our company. Two of them handle the frontend tasks, two more are responsible for the backend, and the rest are full-stack developers. All together, there are 11 employees at IT Manufactory.

What is your current technology stack and what types of projects do you work on?

Our main product is an enterprise web application whose backend is built using the Jakarta EE standard. Therefore, we use Java and other Java EE standards, such as JAX-RS, JPA, and more. The web frontend for our product is built with React, and we also use Redux and some CSS-in-JS libraries. Besides that, we use Prettier and ESLint for rules and formatting, and Swift and Kotlin for mobile development.

How did you switch to IntelliJ IDEA and WebStorm?

I was one of the first to use IntelliJ IDEA in our company back when there were just three of us and we only had a single main module and no separate UI. When we separated our application into frontend and backend, it was natural for me to try React in IntelliJ IDEA. Meanwhile, my colleagues either used Sublime Text or VS Code. Since our product, Digital Automotive, gradually grew more complex, requiring us to make a lot of breaking changes, it became obvious to us that we all needed a solution that would help us keep up with that. As I had already had positive experience using IntelliJ IDEA for frontend and backend tasks, I suggested that other team members try it out, along with WebStorm.

What do you like about using JetBrains IDEs now?

First and foremost, they are huge timesavers. They help us extract functions and variables from the existing codebase in a matter of seconds. The same applies to renaming functions and variables. Deleting unused files safely, without the need to manually look for their usages, also saves us a lot of time. An important thing to note here is that JetBrains IDEs do an impressive amount of heavy lifting for you. All the things I’ve already listed and a lot more, including Local History and the VCS integration, just work out of the box.

Besides that, there are lots of minor things that make our coding experience more enjoyable. For instance, just a single feature where WebStorm notifies us about running yarn install when we do a pull has saved us from unnecessary headaches several times. Or the ability to commit multiple repositories at the same time and quickly clean up our code before committing anything. And the list can go on and on as there are lots of such things in JetBrains IDEs.

Thanks! What are your five favorite IntelliJ IDEA and WebStorm features?

That would be Live Templates, Local History, the ability to commit multiple repositories and check the code for potential problems in the meantime, code completion, and automatic imports.

And your five favorite shortcuts?

Those would be Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+V to paste from history, Ctrl/Cmd+[ and Ctrl/Cmd+] to go through the history of the recently navigated items, a shortcut for updating a project (Cmd+T/Ctrl+T), and a shortcut to commit and push changes (Alt+Cmd/Ctrl+K).

We’d like to thank Varij Kapil and IT Manufactory for taking part in this Q&A.

If you use JetBrains IDEs and would like to share your experience with us, please let us know by leaving a comment below or contacting us.

The WebStorm team

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