Skillaz

What JetBrains products do you use in your development and how long?

Our backend is written entirely in С#. Most of our developers, both on Windows and on macOS, use Rider to code and perform their other everyday tasks.

In addition, we use two IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate licenses for our architects. This gives us more tools to analyze the performance and quality of our code.

For the user interface, our frontend developers use JetBrains WebStorm with the React/TypeScript stack.

We’ve been using these solutions since August 2018. At first, we bought just a few subscriptions to try things out. We liked everything, and soon after we migrated all of our development to Rider.

Please describe the challenges you faced with adopting JetBrains products:

Before adopting Rider, we used Visual Studio for our .NET development with ReSharper, a very helpful extension that makes writing code and investigating code a lot easier.

Skillaz, the software we make, is a complex system for automating hiring processes that saves recruitment professionals from a lot of routine hassle. ReSharper was based on a very similar philosophy in this sense, as it spared us developers from multiple routine operations and helped us focus on the big picture instead of the minute details.

After a while, though, we realized that setup was not as performant and responsive as we required. Switching between branches was slow, impacting our productivity in no small way. That’s when we decided to try Rider.

As a young development company, we were able to join the JetBrains Startup Discount Program. This looked to us like a very lucrative opportunity, so we bought several subscriptions at 50% off to check out all the tools.

Why did your team decide to apply for the JetBrains Startup Discount?

Skillaz was founded in 2015, so until 2019 we qualified as a startup, and our development team was rather small. As we satisfied all the requirements of the Startup Discount Plan, we took advantage of this opportunity in 2018.

Our team has grown quite a bit since then, so our latest subscriptions were bought at full price.

What have been your biggest gains, as well as your biggest pains, from adopting JetBrains products?

Since we had previous experience using ReSharper, adopting Rider was pretty straightforward. Given our small team at the time, we did not run into any major difficulties, so I guess there were no pains to speak of.

All the features we had become accustomed to in ReSharper were also available in Rider, so that was a huge advantage.

We went with JetBrains because of its ecosystem of tools, whose many capabilities not only improve our productivity but help us work better in other ways, as well. I can identify four key benefits that we’ve gained by switching from Visual Studio to JetBrains tools:

1. More effective development. Rider is faster and more stable than VS, so we can code smoothly, with no hiccups or bugs that slow down work.
2. Faster development. Code is compiled and the project is built much quicker. This helps us release new functionality more easily with shorter turnaround times.
3. Less developer downtime. Visual Studio with ReSharper was very resource-intensive, whereas Rider is optimized in this respect. Our developer downtime due to project building is a fraction of what it used to be.
4. Better user experience. Rider enables us to quickly switch between branches that have lots of changes. Because working with branches is easy, development becomes that much faster. I also love the navigation features and the smart debugger.