I joined a project partway through. The agent could read the whole repo in minutes. I couldn’t. The decisions about what to build and how were still mine, and I couldn’t make them on the agent’s understanding. So I turned the usual setup around. Instead of asking the agent questions,...

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Claude Code understands one repo at a time. Most teams have thirty. Microservices, shared libraries, infrastructure-as-code, frontend apps, data pipelines, all in separate git repos. Start Claude Code in one and ask about another, and it has no context. It doesn’t know the workspace exists. To give Claude Code context...

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Using AI coding assistants to introduce, automate, and evolve quality checks in your project. I have talked about teams needing to have a world class developer experience as a pre-requisite for a well functioning team. When teams lack such a setup, the most common response is a lack of time...

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Why it’s harder for a professional developer to use a tool despite the wide variety of choices Coding assistants like Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex, Aider, OpenCode, JetBrains AI etc. have been making the news for the last few months. Yet, the choice of tools is a lot...

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The habits, tools, and practices that set great engineering teams apart. Developer experience (DevEx) isn’t just about fancy tools or slick UIs - it’s about removing friction so teams can move with confidence, speed, and clarity. In high-performing teams, great DevEx means fewer context switches, faster feedback loops, and more...

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Efficient logging that doesn’t bring your application down is simple to setup but is often overlooked. Here are some quick tips on how to achieve exactly that Async Logging Most applications these days should have a single (console) appender. This can be linked up with your log aggregator of choice....

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Yes, you heard that right! I just got notification from the asset management team at ThoughtWorks that IDEA IntelliJ 14 is out and we get free upgrades (since we have an upgrade subscription). If you haven’t seen the features already, you should check it out! It looks like an upgrade...

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Once you get used to the JetBrains suite of IDEs pressing Cmd/Ctrl+W for expanding selection becomes second nature. This leads to closing tabs on most applications such as text editors which is of little consequence since you can train yourself to use a different short cut. My favourite text editor (Sublime Text) does...

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It’s been a bit over 24 hours of using OS X Yosemite and I’m liking all the UI sugar it’s added. So far, my regular applications work fine after the upgrade but the IDEA based IDE set (IntelliJ, WebStorm, PyCharm, RubyMine etc.) seem to have a problem which has been also reported...

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If you’re trying to create a Custom Project in Eclipse, you’ll eventually come to read a beautiful blog post over at Hidden Clause that documents quite well how to overlay your icon over Eclipse’s default folder icon to get the icon of your choice. If you’re default project is an...

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As a developer, I like to look at the source code for the libraries I use in order to understand if what I am doing is the best way to implement it or not. Though Eclipse, by default, comes with features to develop plugins, it doesn’t come with the source...

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If you want Eclipse to integrate well with GitHub (I know there are millions of tutorials out there), you should really follow the tutorial for EGit and make sure you have Git set up on your Windows machine first!

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Well, I’ve been browsing through Visual Studio 2010 for a while now. I’ve not gotten into coding but did get a chance to have a look at the User Interface for this product. Here are some of the things I’ve noticed. WPF is in: Oh yes, you heard right! The...

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Yes, they are out! You might have been hearing about the two for the past week or two around the interneticle blogosphere. I certainly did and as with every VS release, I was excited. VS is the best IDE I have seen so its no surprise that a new release...

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