What makes a nice development project?

When onboarding new developers it is important to make their life as easy as possible. New developers will judge the code base instantly and make assumptions about used tooling and that their preferred tooling is working as well. This brings us to the first point of a nice development project:

The IDE

IDE’s are a huge topic in the developer community. I will not argue what is the best and the worst or if people are happy with using editors. The main point is that the code base should not rely on using a specific IDE for developing. In my professional career, I heard people telling me to let code formatting be done by PyCharm. I heavily disagreed with this approach since people who are using anything else than PyCharm will be nitpicked in Pull Request reviews or in similar events. A lot of useless discussions are being created and a lot of time will be wasted, finally resulting in decreasing the team’s performance.

Other than that you have to see that people are different and even their opinions are different. There is no way you can convince a VIM power user to use PyCharm if he has done a significant amount of development in VIM. He is maybe 50% faster doing stuff in VIM. Performance is not a huge factor though in this whole discussion. The big factor here is that people might like to use their environment and do not…