A little history and movitation

I’m Tamás Balog, a Hungary-based plugin developer for JetBrains IDEs, and former manual QA and test automation engineer. I’ve been using JetBrains IDEs for 7+ years.

Sometime in 2017, I had an interesting talk with one of my test automation colleagues. He told me he spent 2-3 hours trying to find out why a Gherkin scenario could not be executed, and after his suffering investigation he found out there was an additional whitespace at the wrong position, which made the Cucumber parser to fail, but the syntax highlight to keep showing it as correct.
That’s when it struck me that such issues could and should be avoided because they are not just expensive but also because people lose their sanity investigating them.

Hence, my first long adventure was about finding out how code inspections can be created without implementing an actual plugin. That’s what the Structural Search and Replace Templates feature does. I dove fairly deep into this feature, created such templates for my project back then, and public tutorials that you can find on my GitHub and on my blog called I(J)nspector.

Then, in 2020, after giving it some thought, I finally immersed myself in the world of IDE plugin development. Being able to develop them knowing that they are used and hopefully appreciated by engineers, and more importantly they can do their tasks easier (and of course faster), are what drive me to keep developing plugins.

From 2022 I do it as a full-time freelancer.

Publications

• DZone: IntelliJ Integration for Mockito
• JetBrains Platform Blog: Guest Post: The Plugin Obfuscation Experience
• DZone: Custom Code Inspections in IntelliJ
• EPAM Global Facebook: Improve Your Focus at Work with These Minimalist Ideas

Appeared in…

• WireMock.org – Community Resources – September 16th, 2022
• Mockitools on the Spring Blog: This Week in Spring – August 1st, 2022