Boost your productivity by engineering your engineering tools! by Martin Kanters and Guus de Wit

As developers we like to code. However, we often have to context-switch between many tools (Git servers, CI/CD systems, issue trackers, etc.) causing us to lose focus. To circumvent this, we create lots of shortcuts, aliases, scripts and use third-party plugins. Unfortunately, these only "work on your machine" and everybody reinvents the wheel. At the Rabobank, we wanted to take this to the next level, and consider our development tooling as production software. Using Kotlin, Quarkus, PicoCLI and GraalVM, we develop a CLI application that integrates with our Git server, logging platform, monitoring dashboards and more. We improved developer happiness and efficiency by making it super easy to, for example, create pull requests or query application logs directly from the command line. On top of that, we build extensions that allows running the commands from anywhere, not only the terminal (e.g. IntelliJ plugin and Alfred workflow). In this talk, we will show you how we use these technologies through live coding, how we successfully pitched our side project to business and how we upgraded it into an actual product. We will also provide you the necessary starting points to do this yourself and become a happier developer!