sebastiandaschner news

Hello from the beautiful island of Crete. I’ll be joining the JCrete unconference the following week, which will be full of interesting IT discussions and philosophical sessions, and also hot weather, good food, and swimming. I like the disorganized nature of unconferences, since there is no prior agenda of topics and no speakers, in fact everyone is a speaker and can suggest topics that are discussed in small-ish groups. Every time I get a lot of inspiration and helpful pointers in all kinds of directions.

For the next months, I’ll be speaking at a JUG event in Istanbul in August, attending the JavaZone conference in Oslo, as well as the dev2next conference in Colorado. Already looking forward to these trips as well.

In the previous months, I’ve been mostly focused both on Quarkus-related content as well as developer productivity. I see a big demand in both topics. Quarkus is interesting for a number of reasons, in fact both for the business side (cost saving and eco-friendliness) and the developers (developer experience). Developer productivity, especially on the individual level of how to improve the mechanics of our daily routines always is a good investment of one’s time and energy. It’s so cool and fulfilling to see how much it helps developers to have a workshop or in-depth session about one of these topics. You can check out some of the content pieces regarding these topics, and as always if you it’d be interesting to learn more about that in a workshop or consultation, feel free to reach out!

What’s New

13 Cool IntelliJ Features

... that you probably didn’t know yet. Our favorite Java IDE contains so many gems that it’s hard to know about all of them, yet alone use them regularly. A few times I mentioned to my friends at JetBrains that there is probably no single person on the planet who knows every single IntelliJ feature. So far, everyone agreed with that statement.

In this video, I wanted to show lesser-known features that positively surprised me and I think can be really helpful. If you can add to that list, let me know in the YouTube comments or reply to this mail.

13 Cool IntelliJ Features (You Probably Didn’t Know)

Effective Development With Quarkus

Quarkus has been offering an extremely helpful dev mode since it’s inception, which still contains some features or ways of working that a lot of developers don’t fully utilize. Especially with local Quarkus development, you can build up workflows that are not just very effective but also simply fun to work with, since they don’t make us wait.

Especially the way how we build up and execute our tests suite can make or break our development experience, which is why I dedicate a full video course on the topic of testing effectively with Quarkus.

To get an idea, you can watch the following YouTube video: Effective Test Execution With Quarkus

As well as this one: Effective Developer Workflows With Quarkus

Becoming Better at the Keyboard

Over the years, I’ve made the point quite extensively that developers should be proficient in using the keyboard. Besides touch typing, that is being able to type without looking at your keyboard, which tips or techniques can help you becoming better at the keyboard?

I’ve recorded a video in which I’m showing my thoughts and some tips on developers' keyboard skills, how to get a better feeling for your hand positions, haptic points, typing numbers, which keyboard layout might be for you, and decent keyboard devices:

How to Become Better at the Keyboard

Thanks a lot for reading and see you next time!