Scott Wells, a 25+ year veteran software developer and architect and unabashed development tool snob. In 2010 I began working with the Force.com Platform-as-a-Service as a key component of a composite Software-as-a-Service architecture. While impressed with how Force.com effectively commoditizes a vast number of otherwise complex technical components, like many others I was disappointed with the lack of modern development tools for the platform, in particular for Apex and Visualforce development. Illuminated Cloud was born out of this productivity paradox.

As a long-time user of JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA for Java development, I started toying with the idea of a custom language plugin that would ultimately bring the same modern feature set and near-telepathic capabilities of IDEA's Java IDE to Apex and Visualforce developers. As Illuminated Cloud was being developed, I cataloged what I perceived to be the most critical features of the Java editor: completion, navigation, formatting, documentation, and validation. These along with Salesforce metadata Deployment and Retrieval operations became the initial feature set for Illuminated Cloud.