Twenty-five years ago, a small team of software developers in Prague wanted to build something better. That’s a common characteristic among all good engineers. There is always something better to build. The result in this case was IntelliJ IDEA. And this documentary — IntelliJ IDEA: The Documentary | An origin story — explores how it happened. It’s really good. I know some of the developers interviewed for the program. It reviews the good times and also the challenges the team faced over the years. The company, JetBrains, competed against free tools backed by IBM, survived a subscription pricing backlash, and had to earn trust in the community among Open Source developers. They earned that trust by listening, adjusting, directly engaging developers, and building their community from the beginning.
What comes through most clearly is that the product reflected the people behind it. They built the tool they wanted to use and they had to freedom to do just that. And apparently a lot of other developers wanted the same thing since IntelliJ IDEA is now the #1 IDE for software developers.
I also did a Duke’s Corner Java Podcast recently with the IntelliJ IDEA team — Marit van Dijk and Anton Arhipov: 25 Years of IntelliJ IDEA — and we discussed some of the issues touched on in the documentary.