IntelliJ IDEA — The IDE That Changed Java Forever DOCUMENTARY (Category Engineering)
I saw this one. documentary About IntelliJ IDEA that came out 5 March 2026. It’s an exciting story about how a small team started out creating a product that redefines the expectations of dev tools. In the frame are both employees of JetBrains and representatives of the industry who share their memories of how it was.
JetBrains grew organically, without external investment, and from the very beginning built not just an editor, but an “intelligent” tool for a developer – it’s funny that at the end of the film the role of artificial intelligence in software development and the future of IDE is discussed, and the staff of JetBrains say that the editor even in its title immediately contained part about intelligence:) But if we start over, IntelliJ once came from refactoring and understanding code structure, not from a beautiful shell. That’s important: they’re not betting on “another IDE,” but on the machine actually understanding the program more deeply.
Another interesting thought is that the guys showed how developer tools can be a platform, not just a product. In 2009 JetBrains opened the Community Edition and explicitly stated that it removes the main barrier to wider use - price, while maintaining the commercial Ultimate. The Community Edition and IntelliJ Platform have become the base not only for IDEA, but also for other JetBrains tools. And then the chain is already known: Android Studio is officially built on IntelliJ IDEA, and Kotlin, launched by JetBrains. 2011 Open source was part of a very big shift in the JVM and Android world.
The next thought revolves around the quality of the product and the general consumer love for it. In the film, you can see that dog fooding in JetBrains was from the beginning and it was not marectoring. The guys honestly talk about how their products were often born out of internal needs, and the teams themselves work daily in their own tools. Plus, they have culture. 20% projects, hackathons and Labs to grow new ideas. This is a very recognizable pattern: when developers themselves suffer from their UX solutions, the quality of feedback increases dramatically.
The dark inert moment is associated with the approach to doing business. For JetBrains, user trust is more important than the right business model on paper. It's manifested in 2015 The year JetBrains switched to a subscription model caused a strong backlash. The company then publicly admitted that it did not take into account important user groups and poorly explained the changes, after which it quickly added perpetual fallback license and continuity discounts. For me, this is one of the strongest episodes of the whole history: a good product does not give immunity from errors, but a transparent course correction helps to regain trust. You don’t often see a similar approach to not only declaring the importance of user trust, but also justifying it.
Well, the last thought is related to the current trend on AI4SDLC. Now JetBrains promotes AI as a continuation of IDE: Next Edit Suggestions can use native IDE actions like Rename refactoring, and Junie is positioned as a coding agent right inside the IDE. That is, they want to become the center of a new process, where generation is connected with navigation, refactoring, inspection and verification of changes. True, this is not mentioned in the film, but it can be seen by the announcements of new products in their products:)
As a result, managers can pick up theses about The Importance of DevEx Investment and Cool Tools as Development Performance Boosts Dogfooding as a Product Quality Boost Open core as a variant of commercial product development in conjunction with open source The importance of being able not only to declare values, but also to follow them even in times of crisis. Understanding that you can not rest on your laurels and you need to be able to catch the wave (In this case, AI is in development.)
P.S. The summary is on system-design.space.
#Engineering #Software #Management #Leadership #Startup #Architecture #Documentary #AI