How to use your IntelliJ IDE or Android Studio for your live coding challenges

Scratch it

Everybody knows that live coding challenges can be stressful. The next time that you are facing a live coding challenge for your big job interview, what could be better than having the home field advantage!? If you feel at home with Android Studio or the IntelliJ IDE you are in luck!

Jetbrains developed the Scratches feature that helps you in this situation, so before your next interview you just have to… 🥁

Recipe:

1. Create a new project. It is up to you if you want to create a single project, naming it for example “playground”, where you will store everything, or create different projects for different interviews.
2. Click on File -> New -> Scratch File (or press ⌘⇧N) and select your language of choice ( Kotlin 💜 ).
3. Go at it and get that job!

Pretty simple right? It goes without saying that you can use this feature for other scenarios besides live coding exercises! Use it when you want to experiment with some new Kotlin features or show something cool when you are pair programming for example!

Hope this article can help you in your journey and keep going ✌️