For Software developers it is very important to have strong tooling. The very first tooling is the IDE which use for the whole day.

Choosing IDE (Integrated Development Environment)

During college days, most of the students are made to practice coding in Notepad or any basic Text Editor. It will be very good for practicing quick small problems but when we are going to build a complex system with a lot of dependencies this Text Editor approach won't help us. We have to navigate from one file to another file, have to add dependencies, then have to build the system and run them quickly. In these cases going with a Text editor will be slower and so IDEs are best. From my experience as a Java developer, I would strongly suggest using IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse. And for front-end development, I would suggest using VSCode . Both in IntelliJ IDEA and VSCode, we can install lots of extensions.

Editor Inspections

Generally, it is very important to have the same editor inspection in the whole company (or team). Many developers when there is only one line if ..else case forgets to use braces in java, but other developers may not have this practice. Some of the inspections I suggest getting started with are

• Having minimum API usage level (like JDK 8+)
• Having only one Logger per File
• Proper spacing around methods, loops, iterators
• Same code style across system

Mastering IDE shortcuts

As it is very important for everyone to choose the Good IDE, similarly it is very important to remember few important keyboard shortcuts in the IDE. Most of the time as a developer we will be keeping our hands on the keyboard than on the mouse, so it is very important to train our muscles with Keyboard shortcuts. A few of the shortcuts I would suggest remembering is

• Find in File
• Find Across File
• Build the system
• Run the System
• Start the debugging
• Navigating across method or breakpoints during breakpoints
• Quick formating of the whole File

Debugging: The Art of Developer

Everyone can easily write the program when we are good with our logical understanding, but debugging the program and using the debuggers are art. I can write more on this topic but for the sake of the view of IDE will share the short note. Most of the IDE will be supporting debugging, IntelliJ IDEA has great support for debugging Java applications when it is running. During the early stage, it is very easy for developers to use lots of print statements to find out the values across the methods. The problem is it's not easier to remember all the print statements we used for debugging and then easier them before check-in to our central team code repository. So we should enable debugger in our local machine and enable them whenever we want to find the values. To do the same in IntelljiIDE

Run -> Edit Configurations -> Add New Configurations -> Remove JVM Debug

Run Workflow

We have to run some workflow when we are going to do some processes like building artifacts in our system. During one of my project before build artifacts, I will be copying lots of properties files, JSON files from the source folder to the deployment folder, then delete the old logs, delete old artifacts. These things can be sometimes done directly from the IDE or sometimes we have to write some shell script which can be invoked from IDE.