JetBrains Space is a recently released tool; it is an "Integrated Team Environment". It covers wide range of project & team management (issues, issue boards, checklists, chats, etc) and software development tooling features (automation, repositories, code reviews, etc). In this session, we share our experiences in successfully adopting Space tool in our startup (CodeOps Technologies LLP). Presented by Ganesh Samarthyam & Srushith Repakula from CodeOps. Do check out this session if you are interested in software development productivity & tooling, and practical experiences in adopting a new tool. JetBrains Space URL: https://jetbrains.space Video version here: https://youtu.be/afQXALBwULs

1. Our Experiences
Lifting Off
Into Space
Ganesh Samarthyam
Srushith R

2. CodeOps: Space Travellers!
● Bangalore-based startup (from 2016);
JetBrains Authorized Reseller (from Dec
‘19) & Service Partner (Feb ‘21)
● Software Development, Consulting;
Corporate Trainings (mostly Fortune 100
clients)
● Currently ~25 Employees (mostly devs)
(resources shared with KonfHub)
● Covid-impact - virtual & team spread
across India
From last week team meeting (some members not in this call)

3. What is JetBrains Space?

4. Great Lift-Off to Space! And Loving It!
• Early user - immediately after beta announcement
• At that time suffering from ‘too-many-tool’ities!
• Asana (sprint planning), GitHub (repos), GitLab (repo,
code reviews, CI/CD), Slack (team discussion),
YouTrack (issues), ...
• Even Medium (blog), Google Docs & Calendar,
WhatsApp (ad-hoc communication)....
• Numerous others (still using a few of them!)

5. Communicating in Space!
● Chat was the easiest to get started with &
easiest to replace Slack
● “Too-many-notifications”-it is solved!
● Crossed 20k messages in a few months
● Have experienced Space evolving at
Rocket-speed!
○ Love the “Dark theme” released March-end
(already using it!)

6. Life in Space: Mobile, Desktop & Cloud!
● Primarily our team uses the Desktop apps
(both Windows and Mac)
● Even on the move, we access Space as a
mobile app (very convenient); primarily Android
and also iOS
● Only in rare scenarios, we have accessed from
Web / Cloud (some of our team members don’t
even know it is possible!)
● Having to choose from different options makes
Space very convenient!

7. Time Off from Space
● Our holiday list is now in Space
● Earlier were using Google Sheets &
Google Calendar for communicating
holidays to the team

8. Internal Blogs

9. Space Collaboration
● Earlier were using YouTrack
Knowledge Base & Google Docs
● Now it’s easy & convenient to do
collaborative content editing (and we
love markdown feature in Space!)
● E.g., in Google Docs, we have to
provide access to specific people
(painful!); in Space, can provide
access to teams (convenient!)

10. Our Spaceship!
● First we moved existing members to Space
● As new joinees started coming-in, was easy to
get them on Space as part of onboarding
process
● Initial resistance to adopting Space
○ Now team loves it & will kill us suppose we
say “Let’s move out from Space” 😄
● Creating Teams streamlined access to
everything in space (projects, repos, blogs,
documents, …)

11. Absences is Simple & Useful in Space

12. A Worthy Free Ride into Space!
● With other tools, easy to hit user limits very
often in free version (e.g., YouTrack => 10 users)
○ In Space, unlimited users & projects(!) in Free
plan
● Higher benefits for equivalent tools
○ In GitLab, 400 CI minutes in Free plan
○ In Space, 2000 CI minutes in Free plan
● Quite generous - once teams get used to Space,
will move to paid versions as the team grows!

13. Spaceship has a Self-Pilot Mode :-)
● We are a big fan of automation - and we love
the Automation features in Space
● Example: Leveraged the HTTP APIs to
automatically trigger error notifications from
our AWS accounts for better tracking and
immediate actions from the team
● Utilisation of Space CI/CD for faster,
streamlined deployments using quality gates

14. Devs to Cosmonauts (JIRA to Space!)
● Was easy to move from JIRA to Space
-> Used APIs to migrate the issues
● JIRA link maintained so that both boards
can be used till team transitions
● More convenient than JIRA - for
example, directly create issues from
chats in Space

15. Sprinting on the Moon!

16. Moved(ing) to Space: Single Tool
● Gradual use of Space for new projects &
features
○ For us, easiest way to adopt Space
● We’re mostly cured of “too-many-tool”ities
now
● Team more effective
○ Saved from learning new tools
○ Saved from switching between and
managing them
○ Started using features such as “To-Do”
which we haven’t used before as a team

17. A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Space
● Insanely amazing tool - saves time, effort & energy
○ Combines features typically provided in separate
tools to a single one
● Easy to adopt - especially for new projects
○ Easy to migrate from tools like YT and JIRA
● Enhanced s/w development efficiency &
effectiveness
○ Benefited from using Space for developing a our
recent product from scratch (just 5 months from
ideation to public release!)

18. Space - Roadmap

19. Our Space Exploration has Just Begun!
● Space is a vast tool - we are still discovering
new features every time we try using it
● Cure to the disease that most teams face -
“too-many-tool’-ities
● And bring back excitement to coding instead
of fighting with the tools! :-)

20. Resources for Exploring Space
● Check out home page for Space:
https://jetbrains.space
● Lot of blogs in the Space Blog site:
https://blog.jetbrains.com/space/
● “An Exploration of Space” by Maarten
Balliauw (JetBrains) giving an overview of
Space thro’ demo :
https://youtu.be/CxDfvtXdRpg

21. Our Experiences
Lifting Off
Into Space
Ganesh Samarthyam
Srushith R