It just works. I spent years with Eclipse (but quite some time ago now), and it was always a pain getting particular things to work properly. The last time I messed with it was doing research for an article I was writing. I was try to get Gradle support enabled. I wasn't able to do it, but I admit I gave up pretty quickly because I don't have the patience for messing with tools that don't work any more.

In truth, I really liked the Open aspect of Eclipse and I wish it work better than Intellij. Maybe it does now - I don't know. For Java Intellij is awesome, and does everything you could ever dream for. For Kotlin - well Kotlin is an Intellij product and the support for it is awesome.

For me, it's mostly Java and Kotlin. I look for the same kind of things. Things that I like to see:

• Short methods.
• Small classes
• Sensible packages
• Variables declared to Interfaces not implementations
• Single Responsibility Principle applied.
• DRY applied.
• Good names for variables and methods
• Few instance variables
• Few static members
• No comments, because you don't need them
• Uses lambdas, Streams and Optional
• No empty Catch{} blocks
• No f*&^*cking! arrays.

I can generally tell in a few minutes if something is going to be a pain to work with.

That looks cool, but I have no idea what it does.

Anticipating complexity is a critical core concept that isn't taught in school either. Nothing of value ever stays simple. Unfortunately, it takes years of experience before you figure that out.

I use Markdown with Jekyll because it integrates nicely with GitHub Pages and I can run it locally for authoring. There's tons of support for it, as far as I can tell. Jekyll uses Liquid for templating, and it seems pretty good. For layout, I use Minimal Mistakes which has a really nice feel and it's comparatively easy to customize. Once I was through all the layout configuration stuff, it's really just a matter of writing articles and pushing them up to GitHub - rarely fiddle with anything technical these days.

I used Atom for markdown editing for my blog and I loved it. After the death of Atom I felt forced to switch over to VS Code and I hate it.

Hate, Hate. Hate.

I can't tell you why, I just hate it.

I found Pulsar last week and my blood pressure is down where it belongs now.

For programming in Java & Kotlin I use Intellij Idea CE. I cannot image why anyone would bother with VS Code for this purpose either.