Industry: Software Development, Government
JetBrains products used: WebStorm
Organization Size: 65
Country: United States
RoadBotics
RoadBotics is an IT company that was spun out of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute in 2016. To date, it has raised more than $11M in venture capital investment. RoadBotics empowers towns and cities to make objective, data-driven decisions about their roads and infrastructure. They help their customers automate inspections and get actionable data about road networks, including identification of individual distresses like potholes and alligator cracking.
“We switched to WebStorm in part because a lot of the premium features come prepackaged, which let us get started quickly while reducing our dependence on additional third parties. Besides, having all of our software licenses in one place made it easier to manage access to our development tools.”
— Matt Lucas, Head of Product, RoadBotics
Adopting WebStorm
Matt Lucas, Head of Product at RoadBotics, said that the group of JavaScript developers he oversees used various text editors before switching to WebStorm. In 2019, they arrived at the conclusion to unify their development tools across the engineering department. They believed this would help them increase productivity in the long run, as everyone would be working from the same toolbox.
The team looked at several popular text editors, but their lack of an integrated development environment made them non-starters. Matt had previously used PyCharm Community Edition for Python development, and, recalling how powerful it was, he suggested that the team give WebStorm, another JetBrains IDE, a try.
The key benefits of using WebStorm
Matt highlighted several ways that the team of JavaScript developers has benefitted from using WebStorm:
- Ability to get down to work quickly. One of the reasons the RoadBotics team decided to stick with WebStorm was its wide variety of premium features that are available out of the box. As everything from code refactorings to JavaScript and TypeScript support came prepackaged, the team was able to start working immediately, without spending additional time on setting up their work environments. Additionally, having all of the software licenses in one place made it easier for RoadBotics to manage access to their development tools.
- Streamlined debugging process. As all developers are now on the same page from the environmental perspective, they can jump straight to actually debugging code instead of trying to unify the ways they debug code using different tools or installing extra plugins. The ability to add breakpoints and step through the code inside the IDE streamlines the process as well. The team no longer needs to deep dive into the code through the browser interface, which helps minimize distractions resulting from task switching.
- More efficient code refactoring. Matt says that another thing that has become significantly faster with WebStorm is the process of code refactoring. Having used PyCharm in the past, he knew that JetBrains had always had fantastic refactoring abilities. WebStorm has proved to be just as reliable as PyCharm.
Contacts
Matt Lucas, Head of Product, RoadBotics
twitter.com/mattlucasDOTme
https://www.roadbotics.com
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