Abstract
Developer productivity is a hot topic right now, but what does it mean? Is it all just about squeezing more lines of code out of us poor, overworked developers? Or could it, in fact, lead to developer joy?
In this session, Trisha will show some of her favorite IntelliJ IDEA tips for improving her own productivity. She'll use these examples to talk about what productivity is, what it is not, and why it's even more important to us as developers than it is to the organizations that pay our salaries. And it's of course important to them, too!
Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of how IntelliJ IDEA helps them to be effective, productive, and happy. Trisha wants you to look at your toolchain and ask yourself, “Does this enable me to be creative and happy?”
Video
Slides
More Information
(Note: contains affiliate links - if you purchase something through the link, I may make a small commission, but this does not affect the price for you)
Productivity
- The Cult of Busyness - written in 2020
- Beware a Cult of Busyness
- ‘I’m drowning over here!’: How the cult of busyness took over the world of work - written in 2024, and really interesting if you read it after reading the article written during the pandemic
- Slow Productivity (book)
- Badass: Making Users Awesome (book) - this book talks about the cost of cognitive load
- Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (book)
Developer Productivity
- SPACE Framework
- Flow (wikipedia)
- Why flow matters more than passion (blog)
- Why Does Experiencing ‘Flow’ Feel So Good? (blog)
- Happy Path Programming By Bruce Eckel & James Ward: Trisha Gee on Developer Productivity (podcast)
- Developer Productivity ISN'T About Measurement: Trisha Gee In The Engineering Room Ep. 26 (video)
- Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) Handbook (free eBook)
- DPE - What's in it for me? - one of my presentations
- Developers’ Diverging Perceptions of Productivity (free book)
- State of DevOps Report 2024 - I used this report to find the details of how many developers are using AI and whether they trust it.
IntelliJ IDEA Tips
- IntelliJ IDEA Tutorial: 9 Must Know Shortcuts (video) - I did a video for Dave Farley's Continuous Delivery Channel showing the key shortcuts for writing code.
- Top 15 shortcuts (video)
- JUnit 5 Live Template (blog)
- Creating a Live Template (tutorial)
- Productivity Guide (reference documentation)
- Code inspections (video)
- Debugger (playlist)
- Gradle in IntelliJ IDEA (video)
- The Secret To Reading Code That's Unfamiliar (video) - a video I did for the Continuous Delivery channel about why we hate reading code and what to do about it. Includes IDE tips for understanding code.
Java
- Pattern Matching for switch
- Record Patterns
- '_' for unused variables (Preview)
- String Templates (Preview)
AI
- The Rift Between Junior and Senior Developers - an article I wrote for O'Reilly about how AI use might vary between developers with different experience levels
- Will AI Replace Junior Software Developers? (video) - I created this for the Continuous Delivery Channel, it's on the same topic as the article above.
- Challenging the Myths of Generative AI - fascinating article that helps reframe a lot of what we know about AI as really sales and marketing rather than fact.
More resources for learning IntelliJ IDEA
- Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEA (book) - Discounted copy of our book (PDF and eBook). Paperback and hardback versions available from Amazon.
- Working with Code in IntelliJ IDEA - Leanpub course. This link gives a discount, and it's free if you have a Leanpub account
- Developing Applications with IntelliJ IDEA - Leanpub course. This link gives a discount, and it's free if you have a Leanpub account
- JetBrains Guide - Loads of tips and tutorials on how to use your JetBrains IDE
- Getting to Know Your IDE playlist (IntelliJ IDEA YouTube Channel)
Hello World
Demo: Hello World at Speed (video) - in earlier versions of this talk, I live-demoed creating a Hello World app from scratch. To save time in the talk, so I can move on to the interesting stuff faster, I've put a video of the demo on YouTube if anyone is particularly interested.
This demo:
- Uses the New Project wizard, selecting Java with Gradle (using the Groovy DSL).
- Makes use of Code Generation (video), Code Completion (video), Live Templates (video), Keyboard Shortcuts (video)
More information:
- Create your first Java application (tutorial) - from the JetBrains reference documentation.
- Creating your first Java application with IntelliJ IDEA (video) a video version of the above tutorial, a more fully-featured version of Hello World.