"The inability of developers to tell if a tool sped them up or slowed them down is fascinating in itself, probably applies to many other forms of human endeavour, and explains things as varied as why so many people think that AI has made them 10 times more productive, why I continue to use Vim, why people drive in London, etc."
#ai #softwareengineering #developerexperience #productivity #perception #slower
JetBrains builds brilliant tools. No question. But somewhere along the way, something shifted. The IDE that once felt like a sleek exosuit now wears more like a lead apron. Familiar, powerful but exhausting.
Remember Eclipse? I do. Grew up with it. Then grew out of it, death by poor developer experience. I see echoes of that fate in JetBrains, and it terrifies me. Not because JetBrains is bad. But because it was once… fun.
I've seen more memory leaks, heavier startup times, and codebases that feel like they took a wrong turn into a garbage collector. A "Hello World" project now needs 5GB If I leave it open long enough. It starts asking me existential questions.
My IDE now eats up 15GB with simple projects. Caches? Massive. Often useless. Builds that run clean in terminal break in IntelliJ until I do the sacred dance: Build → Rebuild Project or Invalidate Caches. It's a modern ritual. I now default to my terminal. It's honest. It listens. It doesn't pretend.
Plugin development? A labyrinth. Testing plugins is like chasing asynchronous shadows. Documentation is scarce, SDKs mutate overnight, and the event system reminds me of a toddler with espresso. Thousands of change events for a single file edit. I wanted to build useful tools.
Even giants like AWS and CodePilot plugins throw random exceptions. Testing? What's that? The SDK laughs in JUnit.
The final twist: my own plugin, full of hope and effort, is now the ugliest code I've ever written. I can't fix it. I barely recognize it. I miss simplicity. I miss reliability. I miss fun.
JetBrains still has brilliance. But quality? It's slipping. The warning signs are glowing. Not with malice, but with entropy.
Would be poetic if a new IDE emerged soon. Just like JetBrains once did, fresh, small, efficient. Until then, I'll keep fighting caches, memory bloat, and undetectable test classes… while whispering my Eclipse shortcuts in IntelliJ like ancient spells.
Funny, isn't it? Software today feels less like writing code and more like running a game engine. But the bugs aren't part of the plot. They're just bugs.
"AI makes coding faster!" - but are we counting all the costs?
Working with dev teams, I've seen the gap between hype and reality. The trade-offs are real and worth understanding.
https://agilepainrelief.com/blog/the-real-cost-of-ai-generated-code-it-s-not-all-it-s-cracked-up-to-be/
#AITools #DeveloperExperience #TechDecisions
#Burnout: is more than just a buzzword. Holly Cummins nails it: "If people work too much, it may seem like this short-term gain, but then you get burnout and that doesn't help anybody."
Dive deep into the science of true #Productivity with Holly Cummins as she dismantles the "do more with less" mentality. Essential insights for senior developers and leaders in our fast-paced tech landscape.
#transcript included
I've added Baseline status to the CSS property documentation tooltips I previously implemented in DevTools.
Also, I've updated the vscode/web-custom-data package version that is used under the hood in DevTools.
So DevTools now displays info for all the new CSS properties that have come out in the last 3 years!
Available now in @Chrome Canary. 
According to METR, developers using AI tools reported feeling more efficient, but the real-world data tells a different story: a 19% increase in task completion time.
This "perception gap" highlights the need for rigorous evaluation of AI's real-world impact in software development.
More insights on #InfoQ 
https://bit.ly/3TNmmGq
"At the heart of mise-en-place is an unrelenting honesty about the limits of time and space."
#softwareengineering #developerexperience #productivity #focus
https://fortelabs.com/blog/mise-en-place-for-knowledge-workers/
TECHNICAL DEBT is like a ROTTING ROOF
On rainy days, it's too wet to fix it.
On sunny days, there's no leak… so you ignore it.
Then one day, boom, ceiling caves in, buckets everywhere, and you're duct taping production at 2am.
That's technical debt.
Not just messy code. Not just bad practices.
It's what you chose not to fix when you could have.
The missing tests.
The config you hardcoded "just for now".
The abstraction you skipped because "it works".
The one extra iteration after the ticket was marked as "done".
And now it's slowing you down.
It's holding your future hostage.
You're spending engineering cycles bailing water, not shipping value.
We love to say we're "building", but half the time we're just… leak managers.
You can't scale rot.
So next time the sun's out, fix the roof.
Because when the rain hits, it's too late.
"The smaller the step, the faster we can rotate. The more we rotate, the more engagement we feel as a group."
#softwareengineering #developerexperience #productivity #ensembleworking #smaller #faster
#Storybook v9 is out!
This release brings improvements to testing through a collaboration with Vitest, and introduces a flatter dependency structure for better #Performance and an improved #DeveloperExperience.
Discover what's new: https://bit.ly/44M7yNg
I had an interesting chat with @kevindubois and Olimpiu Pop on the latest episode of the @infoq Podcast. We talked about developer experience, cloud native, serverless, generative AI, and the role of #Java as a modern ecosystem to tackle all these areas, continuously evolving to adapt to new industry and developers’ needs.
#CloudNative #AI #DeveloperExperience
https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/java-ecosystem-continuously-adapting-developers/
Hiring PHP devs in 2025? I focus on problem-solving, communication, and depth—not buzzwords. Here's how I decide who makes the cut.
https://mikelopez.com/blog/1139
#PHP #Hiring #RemoteDev #DeveloperExperience #Management
Reminder that I’m available to hire for casual #Ruby #Rails #DeveloperExperience things like improving tests, dependency upgrades, and, my favourite, writing code style rules!
https://www.issylong.com/work-with-me/
It sounds fairly niche, but hey, I know what I like and what I’m best at!
Meta is rewriting its mobile messaging infrastructure in #RustLang, phasing out a legacy C codebase that engineers found hard to maintain and frustrating to work with.
More details on #InfoQ https://bit.ly/4kzBvpG
Ready to level up your engineering influence?
In this #InfoQ #videopodcast, Mark Allen shares invaluable insights on how #SoftwareEngineers can boost their impact. He explores why building strong cross-organizational relationships and solving high-impact problems are more crucial than ever for #CareerGrowth.
Watch now on YouTube: https://youtu.be/DBDvXNwKIxY
Last month I delivered a talk at Geektime Code developer conference about Platform Engineering, what it really is (beyond the hype), and how to do it right.
For those who asked, you can find more information in my blog post:
https://horovits.medium.com/platform-engineering-devops-evolution-or-a-fancy-rename-a0cad2cdc819
"The cost of writing code has indeed dropped. But the cost of making sense of it together as a team hasn't. That's still the bottleneck."
#ai #softwareengineering #developerexperience #cost #teams
https://ordep.dev/posts/writing-code-was-never-the-bottleneck
I love reading Python code, and I have learned so much from going through the Requests, Flask and pyca/cryptography repos. This is a really interesting readthrough of one of the stdlib modules that I wouldn’t ever have considered.
1/5 Heya Fed, Hint of the day for the devs out there: I was heavily reliant on Dependabot to keep my project's software dependencies versions up to date (you are keeping your dependencies up to date, right?).
Some colleagues who are deeper into OSS told me to try Renovate, but I mostly dismissed it as just alt tech.
1/5 Heya Fed, Hint of the day for the devs out there: I was heavily reliant on Dependabot to keep my project's software versions up to date (you are keeping your dependencies up to date, right?).
Some colleagues who are deeper into OSS told me to try Renovate, but I mostly dismissed it as just alt tech.
