JetBrains IDE's is the most notable exception of dev tools I personally pay for, insane value and productivity makes it a no-brainer purchase given its instant ROI from time saved. Life's too short to not maximize your productivity for a few $'s.
JetBrains is a great example. People pay them because the product is by far the best and the cost is reasonably humble. I think it wouldn't make the same total revenue if they were selling it for twice the price.
Most software sales are more elastic and would sell closer to half the number of units at twice the price, not meaningfully increasing revenue. (This can be good or bad, depending on the industry and the competition.)
I'd pay for it if I did enough programming in my day-to-day life that it would justify the cost. But I only occasionally get into the swing of doing a project, and even then I've never made money off of any of them.
I still have my university email (graduated in 2020) so I've been renewing my student license that gets me a free license for the occasional times I use them.
I kinda wish they'd just go for the Winrar or Docker business model, where it's free for individuals but businesses have to pay up.
Also, even though it's "expensive" for an individual user, you own a full version forever!!! That makes the several hundred dollar price tag much less of an issue.
Yeah, I jumped in when they first did subs back in 2015 (IIRC). Nowadays, the charge seems pretty trivial for what you get, though I think they may have just raised it on me a little to closer to $175.
I also jumped into a personal O'Reilly Safari subscription way back when the price wasn't as high as it is now, and I've kept that grandfathered subscription up as well.
I think between the two, it ends up being a bit less than $500 a year. That's not very much at all against a tech salary, and the O'Reilly sub actually has been quietly useful for work projects now and again too.
My basic take is 1) A builder should have their own set of tools whether they hew wood or numbers (and not everything fits neatly into Visual Studio Code, though I probably use that as much or more than Jetbrains); and 2) if I ever do manage to squeeze out a profitable side project in CA, I want my argument that I'm not using my employer's resources in any way shape or form to be very very solid.
In CA, who owns the resources is the difference in who owns that product. For the same reason, I always buy my own cell phone and pay my own cell phone plan, even if a corporate phone is otherwise forced on me, and always own my own laptop as well for any personal development that comes up.
It's a touch on the paranoid side, I guess, but I just feel better knowing I can be as independent as I want to be with my tech stack. With my own tech library to lean on, a nearly universal set of build tools licensed specifically to me, and my own devices for communication and development, I feel very comfortable that there's no implied shared resource argument that can be made.
JetBrains IDEs are the only dev tool I pay for as well. I write kotlin professionally and for fun and the Intellij + Kotlin experience is the most I've enjoyed writing code since my early days learning Ruby.
Kotlin is such a lovely language, and I really like that it was made by JetBrains because that means I can count on a top notch IDE/development experience.
The fact that Kotlin was created by JetBrains and appears to require their IDE to be productive is the reason I have no interest in it. I'm totally blind and while JetBrains IDE's are technically accessible with my screen reading software they are difficult to use unlike VSCode which makes an effort to be plesent to use with screen reader software not just technically possible to use.
I've always used VSCode and I really don't see what it is that JetBrains can do that VSC can't. Any time there's a new language I'm picking up I can almost always count on a good extension to provide all the necessary intellisense I need.
Good to hear they've done a better job with their screen reader accessibility as well. I learned to use VoiceOver a month ago (I do a lot of front-end dev work) and ever since then I've had a lot of appreciation for any app/site that manages to pull do it well
Who said that kotlin requires intellij? Not a rhetorical question. I've never heard that claim before. Afaict there's nothing about the language that would make it impossible to use in another ide.
This is one point that worries me about Kotlin (which I like a lot). Is it even practical developing in Kotlin using something other than IntelliJ?
All of its toolsets come from the same company, which could kill it one day.
Yes, but the work you do has commercial value to you also, based on its merits alone.
Example: without Intellij, you deploy some back end code interacting with an OCR solution.
Example: with Intellij, you can build the whole OCR solution yourself.
Doing the latter translates long term into higher salaries and more money in your pocket. You have to talk about what you did in interviews and your answers will be reflected in the offers you get.
The only way this would not apply would be if you can say “I am absolutely sure I will never move on from, or be laid off by, my company,” which is not a recommended strategy in this economy.
Few times I tried JetBrains rider trial because was fed up with Visual Studio performance issues and occasional crashes. But rider won't even compile my solution OOTB. Meh.
I’m coming to feel this way about github copilot, especially as a solo dev right now. Is it perfect? No. But it works often and spits out code that’s a good enough template or good enough, and is something i’d likely find on stackoverflow anyway. It’s kind of like I’m reviewing a junior/mid dev’s code and almost like I have a second person working with me which I find very valuable.
Disagree. The comment I replied to was about personally paying for tools. My read was that they meant for personal use. And you started the snark, not me.
regardless I think a point was missed that you might end up pushing up code produced by copilot that could get your company in legal trouble
While I think this concern has a lot of merit, I use Copilot a lot almost always just as a fancy autocomplete. I wouldn't ever let it produce a completely new piece of code for me and I imagine most other devs using it have the same practices so this critique never really hit
I personally pay for Intellij but lately I've found it harder to motivate when vscode provides a very similar experience and especially since Python is supported out of the box for vscode.
I personally find JetBrains IDEs' capabilities exceed that of VSCode. The IDE just feels better thought out to me. However, the convenience of VSCode Web/GitHub Codespaces far exceeds that of JetBrains IDEs', so that's where I'm at now - on-demand web-based IDEs and a thin client.
After trying it a bit more I am slightly leaning towards keeping Intellij again. Mostly because of being better at the small things. Like more readable file tree-view and better project search tools.
Secondly, not everything and everyone from Russia is bad. But if you subscribe to that narrative, good for you and good luck finding a tool that comes close to JetBrains.
Could you point me to a couple videos of Czech JB devs talking at Czech conferences in Czech?
Asking seriously. Because I was a russian speaking Ukrainian until recently and used to listen to tech podcasts and talks in russian all the time, for years, starting back when JB products just started gaining popularity. Not once was the company or it's products regarded as Czech by russians. It was always talked about as russian, all the podcast guests from JB were russian, all the conf speakers were russian.
Now, it wouldn't be the first time russians appropriated something that wasn't theirs. Which is why I'm asking if there are actually any signs of JB operating in Czechia outside of company being registered there. All I can find is JetbrainsCZ youtube channel with whopping 44 views on its single office walk video.
They say they had three R&D offices (out of 6) in Russia and closed them in March 2022.[1] 131 out of 161 open positions on their career page list Prague as one of the possible locations.[2]
Why should an multinational IT company aiming at developers talk in a local language? How does a heritage of founders matters? Google is half a russian company by that metric, as in "Sergey Brin".
JetBrains is a Czech company because it was created in Czech Republic and is operated from Czech Republic. They've had significant development resources in pre-war Russia, like many big companies, because it was a cheap and good. As the war started, they've rescued whoever they could and closed their russian offices.
The war started in Feb 2014, just saying. JB closed offices only when they become afraid of getting squashed by new USA secondary sanctions, not because they opposed war.
Depending on what you count you could give a number of other dates, some significantly earlier than 2014. The current massive offensive, which is significant enough that pointing out they reacted then and not in 2014 or some other date is at best being facetious & disingenuous, started in force in Feb 2022.
JetBrains where silent when the war started. I was a bit worried what would happen. Then they announced the closing of the dev offices in Russia. They said that they needed to extract some people before announcing. It’s not an easy task relocating hundreds of people.
Well, there we go. The grandparent comment argued that JB is a russian company (as in employing mostly russians) and it may not be a right thing to do continuing to pay pretty salaries to people responsible at the very least for letting their country slip into genocidal fascism, while they enjoy their new life in Europe and the regime they helped raise continues murdering Ukrainians and kidnapping their children.
> Could you point me to a couple videos of Czech JB devs talking at Czech conferences in Czech?
Do you have examples of them not talking Czech at Czech conferences? Not talking a particular local language at an international conference is not a significant metric IMO. A great many companies from all over the world send people out to speak English (or at least American!) at conferences. As a linguistically ignorant Englishman this is rather useful to me, but it doesn't make those companies not French, not German, not Indian, not Chinese, etc.
Heck, if (caveat: speculation, I've not looked into this at all) Russian is a common enough second language in the country (or at least amongst local+visiting delegates for conferences about these subjects) then some talks at a conference in the Czech Republic being in Russian would not be surprising, much like you see many talks in English/American countries where English is not an official language (and similar for other languages that are significantly more common if you count people with them as second+ languages as well as native speakers).
> used to listen to tech podcasts
The issue is more acute with podcasts than conferences: the audience is international, so they might not have the luxury of using their native language while serving a large enough target audience.
> Because I was a russian speaking … listen to tech podcasts and talks in russian all the time
I see much room for confirmation bias here. What reason would they have, beyond national pride which is valid of course, to make a point of explaining “we aren't Russian BTW” on a Russian language podcast? Especially give that could be seen as a bit of a down-play of the Russian audience if national pride works the other way against them.
This sort of fundamentalism isn't what stimulates societies to make peace, which you ostensibly want. The way to peace is tolerance and getting Russia to see that too, not drawing lines in the sand and beating your chest. That leads to more war. It is easy to see examples of this, as the US has been doing this for as long as it's existed (at least, when it wasn't at war with itself - and even then).
If you think what the US did in the middle east was bad, you ABSOLUTELY should stop helping america profit. Just because nobody has the balls to actually punish america for the horseshit we have pulled, doesn't mean it's not the correct thing to do.
