DaTe Gulis

Useful tools and links to get you started as a DaTe member.

Tools to get you started

Here are some nice and mostly free tools and apps to help with your studies.

All tools listed here are free and cross platform.

JetBrains

JetBrains is a company that has an IDE for almost every language. If there isn’t a dedicated IDE for something, there probably exists a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA.

What is an IDE?

From Wikipedia:

An integrated development environment (IDE) is a
software application that provides comprehensive
facilities to computer programmers for software development.
An IDE normally consists of a source code editor,
build automation tools, and a debugger.

Some examples of IDEs are IntelliJ IDEA by JetBrains, Code::Blocks and Microsoft Visual Studio

If you want to make things hard for you, feel free to use Eclipse. However, we recommend using IDEs by JetBrains. This section will help you accuire the PRO versions for free and get them set up.

Get the student licence

The student licence is automatically activated by your @abo.fi email and needs to be re-verified annually.

  1. Start by visiting the JetBrains student page.
  2. Click APPLY NOW on the student page or visit the sign up page.
  3. Sign up with you university email (@abo.fi)
  4. Wait for an email to arrive to you INBOX.
  5. Verify your account by clicking the link in the email.
  6. Congratulate yourself, you have just received 650€ worth of software for free!

Get the JetBrains Toolbox App

The easiest way to download and update your JetBrains software, is with their Toolbox App.

When the Toolbox App is installed, sign in with your JetBrains account.

Download some IDEs

The tools that you need in the beginning are:

  1. IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate. This is mostly for Java development, but plugins can make it do everything you can imagine.
  2. PyCharm Professional. This will help you when developing Python.

We recommend choosing the Ultimate or Professional versions of these applications, as they have more features and, well, you can.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a great Open Source tool made by Microsoft. Currently it is the most popular text editor among developers (according to Stack Overflow).

This text editor too depends on extensions to add features and of course, Git is built-in.

Similar editors are Atom and Sublime Text.

Git

What is Git

From git-scm.com:

Git is a free and open source distributed version
control system designed to handle everything from
small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

Why you need it

We recommend setting up Git as early as possible, as it will come very handy during many courses, isn’t really taught in school and knowing how to use it is expected by all employers.

Next steps

As Git and Github are rather wide subjects, we have a dedicated guid for using them.