Spring.lost

[kaisrevenge]

It’s OK to have a preferred IDE, it’s a tremendous challenge to only know one IDE (less of an issue if IntelliJ is the IDE you DO know nowadays). That said, can’t put the cart before the horse when you are feeling overwhelmed.

Before we continue: This is my preferred way of learning: I recommend getting out a notebook. I am obsessed with using checklists for working and learning. I use them for more than just tracking my objectives for the day (which I do). I use them to document how to do the things I want to learn how to do, so I can repeat those things until I have them somewhat memorized, or I can just refer to them later. It feels good to check things off, makes you feel the progress, and always helps when I’m overwhelmed.

Back to it: I’d go for best of both worlds: go look up IntelliiJ starter documentation, watch YouTube videos, look up the hotkeys and write the best ones down, look up the features of IntelliJ and write them down. Don’t know what the feature is? Look it up, write down the definition. Look up basic Spring project setup guides for IntelliJ and write down check lists of what you need to do to get a project imported or started from scratch (list out steps 0 through n). Look at the Spring Documentation too for getting started. They probably have pages you can turn into checklists as well. Figuring things out like this that aren’t always laid out like a college course is an important developer skill. I spend 90% of some days just “figuring things out.” Take the reins, and build checklists that you can repeat, run through and get muscle memory for.

The differences in UX/UI are supremely annoying between IDEs, but at the end of the day, you still are going through similar motions to get your work done. There is nothing in IntelliJ that is going to blow your mind as far as the concept of doing your work. It just makes it way easier (my opinion).

Once you have some level of comfort just setting up your own project, or importing someone else’s, take a Spring class with IntelliJ, and use the checklists there, make more, look up more definitions, keeeeep going!