Review of OpenDay JetBrains mitap

On April 19, 2018, the OpenDay JetBrains rally took place in Moscow, which was visited by a large number of people, including me. I decided to share my impressions about this event and about the company itself.

Anticipation

About the mita I learned from the announcement on Habré . During registration, they asked to indicate exactly what I would like to hear at the meeting, which was strange, since the topic of the reports was announced. Then on April 17, a letter arrived with details of the venue. When I began to ask my colleagues at work who would go, it turned out that many would go, but were not in the know. Maybe this is JB's error and weak PR, and maybe they already received quite a large number of registrations. In general, I went alone. But at the event itself there was no control and, in principle, anyone could pass. It's a shame for those who wanted to go.

Program

• 18:30 - Meet the guests. Coffee, sweets.
• 19:00 - Kotlin programming language. What is it and why. Roman Belov, PMM at Kotlin
• 19:45 - “Xodus” is the database where YouTrack stores bugs. Maxim Mazin, Team Lead at YouTrack.
• 19:45 - Experience in developing a full-stack application on Kotlin. Sergey Shkredov, Team Lead in a new product.
• 20:30 - Evolution of features in IntelliJ IDEA. Nikolay Chashnikov, Team Lead in IDEA Core.
• 20:30 - How we improve performance in Rider. Andrei Akinshin, Senior developer in Rider.
• 21:15 - Absence Minimum processes - also a process. Sergey Kuks, .NET Department Lead.
• 10:00 pm - Questions and answers: open discussion with Maxim Shafirov, CEO of JetBrains.

Halls were two for parallel reports. From the parallel reports, I chose "Experience of developing a full-stack application on Kotlin" & "Evolution of features in IntelliJ IDEA"

We meet guests

So, the mitap took place in Moscow City in the banquet hall of the Crystal Ballroom, located on the fourth floor of the Oko Tower. In the lobby, JB employees were friendly and greeted in blue T-shirts with the inscription JenBrains Band. Who had time, was able to get a nice T-shirt with the inscription JetBrtains rocks, very many here also began to dress in new clothes. Coffee and cookies were abundant and the hall itself struck with a huge screen, on which everything was clearly visible. I can’t answer for sure how many people came to the mitap, but according to Sregey Kuks there are about 500 people, which seems to be true in principle.

Programming language Kotlin. What is it and why

The first report was mainly about basic things in Kotlin. For those who already write on Kotlin, I think it was pretty boring, but it was interesting for me to recall some features of the language, since I hadn’t taken checkers for a long time. More interesting were the questions after the report. The questions were asked briskly and Romana was driven off the stage in order to continue to answer not from the stage. For me the most interesting thing was to find out that for Kotlin there is now an official style guide.

Experience developing full-stack applications on Kotlin

The second report didn’t quite correspond to its title, I expected to see there examples of code, hardcore and something that can be applied in practice, but there was a theory and a superficial examination of the architecture, how they build and assemble a full-stack project. I do not know who this report was focused on. The entire report could be put in one paragraph. And the title to give this: "Hedgehogs cried, injected, but continued to eat the cactus." In general, judging by the answers to the questions asked, we can draw the following conclusion: Kotlin continues to move in the direction of cross-platform identity, there are successes, but it is still not in that condition so that you can comfortably write a cross-platform application.

Feature Evolution in IntelliJ IDEA

The third report was a big disappointment. I was really expecting something dynamic, interesting stories about how certain ideas of features came, but there was just a story about how the addition and code folding developed, in only half an hour only two features that most people use and what it was said not once. The only thing that was interesting was that the highlighting of the names of the method arguments appeared as code folding, but only working in the opposite direction. Those. The code is expanded, but when the cursor gets there, it collapses. As a result, this feature was carried out in a separate view, since the behavior of folding the code on the contrary - does not work the way the user expects.

The absence of Minimum processes

The fourth report was straightforward about what I wrote in the topics that I expected to hear at the conference, namely, about how the development of projects is going on in JetBrains itself. Sergey Kuks spoke, he is from the .NET team and he talked more about how their development is going, but he constantly mentioned that there is no fixed process of development in the company, each team works in its own way, how it wants and how convenient it is for developers. On the whole, it was interesting to listen to and it seemed that the principle set forth by Peter Leonidovich Kapitsa really worked for them (which was present on one of the slides)

To lead is not to hinder good people from working.

Questions and answers

Not only Maxim Shafirov was present on the stage, but all the speakers who spoke today, HR. At first, the session went with a squeak, but gradually the room warmed up and the discussion lasted until 22:30. Questions were asked very different about the development of JB, and about the development of Kotlin, about the internship at JB (only here I noticed that a lot of young people, students, and maybe high school students came to the mitap). Especially delighted with the answer that a big feedback is going with rutracker.org

After party

At the end of the official part, they brought pizza and in a separate hall they were treated to beer. There are quite a few people left. The beer was delicious, the pizza was enough for everyone and the conversation turned out to be interesting, I stayed until the very end, until everyone was kicked out (about one in the morning). Practically all the speakers were present, it was possible to talk with everyone, talk for life, and you could see disappointment on the faces of people who needed to go home earlier.

Conclusion

In general, I believe that JB had a good mitap. The main achievement of this event was not that they could teach, surprise, but that they became closer and dearer, at least for me. At first it seemed that JB is a sect in which everyone talks about how they live well here, but after closer communication, it became clear that they are talking about it seriously and sincerely. It never occurred to me that such a large grocery company could contain such informal processes within itself. This really surprised.

I have never thought about working at JB before. Now it seems attractive to me, and given the casual words that they are looking for people with new ideas, there was even a desire to try to get them to work.

I would like to end with a call: if you do NOT like formal processes, you have your own ideas, you want to get more drive and pleasure from your work, then look at JB. It looks like you can realize your potential there.