Just over five years ago, I started working at ServiceNow. Now I'm in the process of transitioning out, as I'm retiring. That's “retiring” in the sense of not being formally employed – I certainly won't stop designing and building stuff.
Before I went to work at ServiceNow, I had been using
a commercial Java IDE called IDEA, from JetBrains (that's their logo at right). I loved it in the way that any craftsman loves a fine tool. But the standard at ServiceNow is
the open source Eclipse IDE, which is awesome in its own different way. I found Eclipse to be just fine as an IDE, but I didn't get the same pleasure from using it that I did with IDEA.
So yesterday I bought IDEA and started using it again, for the first time in five years. That's enough time that my “muscle memory” had completely forgotten it, and I'm relearning it from scratch. But I can tell you already that it has gotten better in the past five years – much better. It has also kept up with all the latest dohickeys and whatnots, so (for example) it now directly supports
git and GitHub and Maven and so on. The code inspection and intention features made me smile as I worked – IDEA seems to always know what I'm about to do, and gives me a simple way to avoid having to type it. It's awesome! And it's very good to have my fine tool back again...
