JetBrains CEO Transition
blog.jetbrains.com
blog.jetbrains.com
But I also recently paid for a month of AI assistant of which I could only use it for a couple of days because of a bug in the authorization process. They make a lot of UI changes, many of which are at least questionable and completely throw off my workflow, and prioritize fancy new features instead of fixing bugs that are sometimes ten years old.
Personally, love their products. One of the only products I will happily pay for. Had to unfortunately deep dive into the C# and .net world for a bit and Rider IDE made the process less painful than it would be with VS code or visual studio.
What have you been using before?
The only thing I can come up with us Microsoft's history of embrace, extend, extinguish and all that. Like how VS Code plugins have a bunch of licensing conditions around them, to the point where they don't run in VS Codium (I use Rider, but a friend had some problems with that).
In general, .NET feels like a more focused Java - ASP.NET is more consistently put together, EF is arguably easier to use than JPA/Hibernate and there's lots of nice integrations (though maybe the AutoMapper thing sucks more than MapStruct). The ecosystem feels smaller and more niche than Java's, which isn't a good thing, but at least what's there is good, in addition to the language being popular in game dev or interactive demos.
It runs on Linux too, the SDK is simple to install and has no issues with containers, it's okay from performance to language features (and even F# exists for those who like that sort of thing).
It's easily in my top 10 for productivity. The other spots might belong to Python/Django, Ruby/Rails or even PHP/Laravel and Node/Express, in addition to Java/Spring Boot or maybe Dropwizard. Not sure about the exact order, but it's not like it matters.
However, Rider is quite a bit slower than VS 2022 (w/o ReSharper – Roslynator has been a good replacement for my needs here) and there's likely no good way around this for JetBrains. Since .NET embraces Roslyn for lots of customizations (custom analyzers, source generators, etc.) Rider must keep a Roslyn workspace around, along with its own analysis, thus doing pretty much everything twice – both for loading a solution and for every keystroke.
In other words, Microsoft has been recommending rearcheticting your extensions from the ground up, because their own code base is too messed up to support 64-bit.
And it looks like JetBrains is doing that, but it takes years for such massive codebase.
Rearchitecting the extension out of the process makes sense. You can easily trace performance issues to an extension and they don’t have to build a bunch of extension performance tooling in the ide
strange, this doesn't match my experience at all. VS 2022 is way better than VS 2019 and earlier but still significantly behind Rider in terms of speed.
According to their own developer survey, Windows Forms was at 22% in 2023 [1].
WinForms != legacy, because it's very extensible! Microsoft still maintains it (last update was 1 month ago). It is also still one of the flagship products for companies that make 3rd-party controls like DevExpress [2], Telerik, Infragistics, GrapeCity and several others.
Students in academia today will not learn about WPF, WinUI, UWP and whatever else MS' pushing. They learn Windows Forms - in my country and in Europe at least.
Hopefully we'll get to switch over to Rider soon, but it's been 5 years already [3]. Big mistake.
[0] https://www.jetbrains.com/help/rider/Working_with_Windows_Fo... ("Unfortunately the support of custom controls is not implemented yet (as of v.2023.3)")
[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/csharp/
[2] https://www.devexpress.com/products/net/controls/winforms/
For the C++ folks, Microsoft has yet failed to produce anything better than MFC, C++/WinRT with XAML and COM/IDL ain't it.
Experience
JetBrains
22 yrs 4 mos
Chief Executive Officer
Full-time
Jul 2012 - Jan 2024 · 11 yrs 7 mos
team lead
Jul 2004 - Jun 2012 · 8 yrs
Software Engineer
Oct 2001 - Jul 2004 · 2 yrs 10 mos
...Doubt it was a dull 22 years.
Also making your family, esp kids move every few years sucks really hard for them, never being able to build their circle of friends.
No, just that "it’s a wasted life".
>I relocated to live in 5 different cities in the same time span, met many different people, for me that counts
And for others having roots, and not just meeting different people like a tourist only to dispose and move on in a few years, but building deep relations with people, is what counts.
To be frank, it sounds like novelty seeking to avoid deeper commitments and more substantial development. Of course if one is young (say <= 30) it can also be fun.
You like to move place to place and meet people. Some like to stay in one place, meet people occasionaly and spend more time with their family, hobby (sometimes you can't really take your hobby with you), camp in the wild with your dog etc.
I also tend to have more control over my schedule. That makes it easy to shift days around to feel different.
Perhaps they believed and had passion for the vision. Then why would you leave?
And even that they had to back down, as Android was starting to lose Java libraries ecosystem, as everyone started to move beyond Java 8.
That is all.
Even the Kotlin Foundation is basically key people from those two companies.
He was leading IntelliJ which is a bigger project than Rider since it develops also the platform on which all the other IDEs are based.
For people with knowledge of political history, this is a strong warning.
My respect for the JetBrains engineering, and the skill of the technical communicators, was met with real distrust. Not for those people, but with this whole "sea change" in the ways that the Internet works.
I find it better (and way faster) than most stuff on the market for in context completions.
You can even train it on your own code.
GitHub copilot chat is really good, though
Now I'm at the stage where I'd prefer to just think at an architectural level and let all of the tedium be abstracted away. Copilot is like autocomplete on crack and I love it.
My strong belief is that autocomplete encourages the use of more descriptive identifier names and therefore is one factor that can encourage more readable and maintainable code.
But I'm certainly not the world's most ultimate programmer.
To me it's just feels a really dumb hill to die on. Copilot has definitely removed a lot of the tedious work in my day to day.
* Computers and other automations never made creative decisions before and were perfect for automating mechanical, rote tasks. Like going through a column of numbers and summing them up, or resizing a folder full of images
* AI attempts to make decisions that we would otherwise make creatively: yes, it may not be truly intelligent, but it undeniably makes decisions that, IF we made them, we would use part of our creative brains
That is the FUNDAMENTAL distinction between AI and other forms of computing: AI, while not intrinsically different than other forms of computing, attempts to take over our creatively-functioning brains. That is why I am against it. Society needs creatively functioning brains to be healthy, and an amalgamation of AI with humanity will have forseen and unforseen consequences, including a subtle but significant modification of our mental operation to make us forget what it is to be truly human.
Oh they absolutely did. Even the early optimizing compilers discovered new pathways and created code that surprised even their authors. The only difference is that now regular people can see and appreciate what computers create.
attempts to take over our creatively-functioning brain
For me, AI code assistants have greatly accelerated my creativity as an engineer. Because they help with boilerplate (and sometimes even have an idea worth considering) they allow me to explore more ideas in less time.
This was very apparent to me when doing the "1 billion row challenge" that folks were talking about a few weeks back. I was able to rapidly try out probably a dozen approaches before finding a well-performing one.
(Now, it must also be said that the gnarly micro-optimizations in the fastest solutions were clearly achieved "by hand." And I would also point out that ChatGPT/Copilot lead me down a few dead ends as well. But over all, a big win for me)
What's key to me about AI code assistants is that they augment my engineering work. I am still writing code, I still need to understand everything, the architecture ideas are still mine.
You are Plato and I claim my $5.
We should have had more caution with computers encroaching everything back then too.
I got a refund.
The plugin can be disabled but not uninstalled, and it attempts to reinstall itself when upgrading the IDE version. Additionally, the latest IDE version has suddenly pushed visual latency while typing into the seconds and broken syntax highlighting / error checking. The layouts now reset each single time I start the IDE, seemingly to always display the AI assistant tab.
Plus, the AI assistant is freemium, while forcing itself upon the user. After a short trial, it attempts to convert the user. It has zero respect for whether the user already has Github's copilot installed. The reset layout conspicuously removes the Copilot tab.
To top it off, the assistant plugin plain sucks and is not ready to compete with Copilot.
Intentional sabotage or not, this is by far the worst feature rollout I've ever seen in their products and it concerns me deeply about the future of Jetbrains. I've had to force downgrade to an early IDE release for now.
No AI in sight.
P.D.: in one year the Community version will be abandoned. Mark my words.
This is their 3rd CEO in 25 years of existence.
Each CEO has been sourced internally.
They have a solid set of products and brand in their market, they offer comprehensive coverage of their customer's needs.
I'd say that they're doing a pretty good job with their strategy, and there doesn't appear to be any emphasis on short term revenue over long term growth.
So this is not your standard publicly listed company movable MBA/CEO replacement.
Yep, you cannot find it at a quick glance, which is the intended effect.
All IDEs except IntelliJ itself come with a community version: PyCharm, PhpStorm, etc.
IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition is available; https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/?section=linux
I used to use pycharm but just switched. Still using Android Studio but that's on Google's dime.
It's probably a safe assumption all of them will disappear then.
That said, I'm paying yearly subscription and I think it should have been improved somewhat. Rollbacking to old JetBrains version.
I hope they don't mess with the recurring discounts for subscriptions.
Honestly, the idea of getting rid of the Community version would be like shooting themselves in the foot, given how popular and passable VSC with a lot of plugins can be. I'm pretty sure nobody would actually consider doing that.
Either way, for larger enterprise projects, JetBrains IDEs still feel like the right tool for the job regardless.
Even as an experienced developer who wants to learn a new framework/language, I prefer Copilot + VSCode ($10/m) as compared to a paid IDE (~ $10/m).
JetBrains cannot be the Nokia of IDEs and let the opportunity pass by, they need to play the game and hopefully, they will (as in the past) remain the top choice.