This week in my Software Engineering Course, I was tasked with gaining familiarity with IntelliJ IDEA, a ‘capable and ergonomic Java IDE.’ Along with this IDE, we used the ESLint plugin along with the ‘Airbnb coding standard.’ As a senior in my undergraduate studies, I have to say I was extremely frustrated writing my first piece of code with the plugin enabled. My window was instantly blown up with red lines outlining the various violations I was making. Correcting all the violations took me almost just as long as it had for me to write the code. It was only after a couple minutes of adding spaces, deleting spaces, tabbing and lining things up did the red lines disappear and the green check mark of approval appear. SUCCESS.
After 5 years of developing my own ‘coding standards’ it took me a while to switch things up to match the coding standards suggested by the plugin. After about the third or fourth project, I began adjusting to the requirements set out by the plugin and found that this helped out immensely with finding errors before I tried to compile and run the program. This helped save me some time in the end.
At the end of the first week of using ESLint with IntelliJ, I have to say I give a green checkmark to the green checkmark!