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Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

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Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#431

Post by samgranieri »

I'm very happy for the team at Jetbrains, they make a solid product.

Back in college in 2002, I was taking a java for programmers class in college, and the teacher was using BlueJ. I had taken programming classes in C++, and had to use Visual Studio for that. I declined to use BlueJ, and decided to find something like Visual Studio. I looked at Netbeans and the predecessor of Eclipse, and eventually found out about Intellij IDEA. I was very happy and used it on a trial basis.

Whenever I've had to use program Java, I've always gravitated towards using Intellij IDEA. If I were programming Java full-time, I'd definitely buy a license for it.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#432

Post by rufus_foreman »

jhowell wrote: post #424
malux85 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed - JetBrains is one of those companies where their products speak for themselves, and I happily pay every year. Absolutely money well spent.

At a time I'd purchase both JRebel and IntelliJ. JRebel had a really "aggressive" sales team that would call and email about renewals. Jetbrains has never had to call me, their product sells itself, for me. I no longer use JRebel.

I love Intellij and no longer use JRebel, and yeah I knew better than to pick up the phone when their sales team was calling.

But that's not why I stopped using JRebel, I stopped using JRebel because 10 years ago I worked on monolithic code bases that got deployed to application servers where a build and deploy cycle took 30 minutes, if I did the build with no unit tests. Even though it took constant fiddling to keep JRebel working and a hot deploy worked on maybe half the changes I made, it saved me many hours.

Now I work on microservices with embedded app servers where a build/deploy cycle is 30 seconds, no need for JRebel. Sorry sales guys!

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#434

Post by creata »

Jakobeha wrote: post #411
victor106 wrote: post #95

It’s rare these to read stories of software billionaires and think it’s well deserved. This is one of those rare cases. Also, IntelliJ runs on Java, for all the bashing that Java gets on HN, it’s an example of how “what technology you pick is less important than your focus on user experience”. It’s amazing that their products are so performant on Java

I used to share the "Java is bad" mindset, but now I realize Java (at least the JVM) is actually really good. The main issues people assume with Java are that it has slow runtime and it's verbose. But the JVM is actually rather fast. Especially compared to JavaScript and Python, which aren't even compiled (and which I still agree with the "it's crap" hivemind). Anything that needs real performance you should be outso…

> which are much better than C++/Rust's approach of being unsafe-by-default.

Nitpick: Rust is safer than Java by default. You can't ever dereference a null pointer (only raw pointers can be null, not references) or make a cast without dipping into unsafe code.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#435

Post by rufus_foreman »

alpo20 wrote: post #375
lolinder wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a JetBrains employee, but which features are you specifically looking for? I've never found a single option in the IDE that's available through a menu that cannot be assigned a shortcut.

I just want them to make a stand-alone git client - their 3 way merge for merge conflicts is second to none.

I think its a step down from Beyond Compare, I've set that up as the diff tool in Intellij before, I might have to do that again in my current environment.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#436

Post by gmadsen »

GordonS wrote: post #343
tuyguntn wrote: post #19

if JetBrains people are reading this, I want to say THANK YOU! You saved lots of developer time with IDE, then Kotlin language. I use Golang, Python and Database IDEs, and they are really nice and time saving, can't imagine how much time you guys saved to Java developers where everything is reflection based annotations and deep level of abstract class/interface implementations. (last time when I worked with Java in V…

JetBrains is one of my favourite ever companies! A few years back I switched from Visual Studio + ReSharper to Rider, and haven't looked back - it's such a fantastic, fully-featured, stable product. I have a personal license that let's me use ReSharper, Rider, dotCover, dotMemory (love this!), dotTrace. Some of the best money I've ever spent, and I happily renew year on year. I also love the pricing model that reduce…

clion is honestly the only product I get excited about new releases.

This last one with partial compile, and specific debug loops, it is an awesome product!

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#437

Post by rufus_foreman »

DerDangDerDang wrote: post #111
Jestar342 wrote: post #103

The thing that most impresses me about JetBrains' products, after the very real "This was made by developers" feel to them, and the excellent community interaction, and the regular and plentiful updates.. is the price. They don't price gouge their users. They could double their prices and still have plenty of sales (but I guess they'd probably lose a lot of personal licenses.) I'm sure they have actually done the num…

They worked out that every personal licensee is an advocate, if not an outright evangelist for their product.

Exactly, that's how I started using JetBrains products, I was working in a shop where everyone used Eclipse, and one developer kept telling everyone that if they tried Intellij for 30 days they wouldn't go back. I think there was only one developer that tried it and then went back to Eclipse.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#438

Post by leetrout »

0dmethz wrote: post #92
leetrout wrote: post #73

I canceled all my personal jetbrains products a few years ago after meeting some of their team at GopherCon. I vote with my money and I was a 5+ year subscriber up until that point. I visited their booth with same enthusiasm as other posters here and lavished praise on their tooling and talked about how excited I was for their Go IDE and they just stared at me and said “Ok, thanks”. Something so empty and almost a pr…

You stopped using their tools because some people at a conference didn't respond enthusiastically enough to your praise?

I understand why it seems that cut and dry - one of those “in the moment” or “you’d have to have been there” I guess.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#440

Post by atsuzaki »

Jakobeha wrote: post #411
victor106 wrote: post #95

It’s rare these to read stories of software billionaires and think it’s well deserved. This is one of those rare cases. Also, IntelliJ runs on Java, for all the bashing that Java gets on HN, it’s an example of how “what technology you pick is less important than your focus on user experience”. It’s amazing that their products are so performant on Java

I used to share the "Java is bad" mindset, but now I realize Java (at least the JVM) is actually really good. The main issues people assume with Java are that it has slow runtime and it's verbose. But the JVM is actually rather fast. Especially compared to JavaScript and Python, which aren't even compiled (and which I still agree with the "it's crap" hivemind). Anything that needs real performance you should be outso…

Even though the specs says nothing about it, modern JavaScript is almost always JITted, i.e. V8 that powers Node and Chrome, the rest of the browser js engines
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