sebastiandaschner news

Moving on

Welcome to my newsletter #49!

31st March was my last day at IBM. I’m very grateful for the last adventurous 2.5 years, that I could visit developers, conferences, colleagues, and clients all around the globe. I remember the whole time with a smile and many people contributed to that smile :) I create a Twitter thread, in which I shared the most memorable moments of the last 2.5 years.

The reason for my change was to have new challenges, also adapted to the current situation, and to continue to enable and coach developers, in a slightly different way. I’ll go back to being a self-employed consultant, trainer, and author, and I want to focus more on helping developers solve the challenges in their daily work, in Java, as well as the broader topic of developer productivity. If my updated offerings on my website sound interesting to yourself or your team, feel free to reach out.

What’s new

Development workflows that put you in a flow state

Programming is very much a flow activity in which we can fully immerse ourselves. There are differences, however, in how much our local development setup allows us to do so, especially with regards to the waiting times.

I’ve published a video, in which I’m showing what to consider in our development environments to come up with a setup that enables flow. We’ll see an example of a Java backend application development using Quarkus, and a frontend example.

Check out the video here.

Interview with Venkat Subramaniam — The Effective Developer podcast

I had the pleasure to interview Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, an award-winning author, mentor, trainer, instructional professor at the University of Houston, and overall well-known personality in the software industry.

In the interview we covered many very interesting topics, mainly around productivity, from Venkat’s ideal working day, focusing, cognitive load, managing time, automation, notifications, standing desk setups, to how to deal with the current situation in the pandemic, and much much more.

I really enjoyed the interview and I’m sure you will too.

Check out the episode here.

My tips for using IntelliJ IDEA effectively

I’ve published another video, in which I share my IntelliJ IDEA tips and tricks, and especially keyboard shortcuts that make me more productive. I frequently get the question when live-coding in some presentation, how I can know and remember that many shortcuts and what I’m using, but actually, it’s mainly just a handful, that’s I’m using all the time.

So, instead of trying to learn all the countless shortcuts available, there are a few things that give you the biggest productivity boost already.

Check out the video here.

Thanks a lot for reading and see you next time!