welcome
Thank you for purchasing the MEAP of 100 Java Mistakes and How to Avoid Them. You probably already have some experience with Java and want to enhance your knowledge.
I have been programming for 30 years, including 13 years of commercial programming in Java. One thing that I constantly encounter in my daily job is bugs. I introduce bugs myself or discover bugs introduced by other programmers. When I see and fix one I always think: is it possible to avoid similar bugs in the future? How can I help myself and other programmers on my team to not run into this particular problem again?
Nine years ago, I encountered the Java static analyzer FindBugs. This was really an astonishing discovery for me. I launched it against my project, and it found many problems, both very stupid and very tricky ones. I learned a lot about Java simply by reading FindBugs reports.
Soon I started to notice the limitations of FindBugs and I felt that I could improve it. So I started to contribute there, on small things at first, and then on whole new detectors to find new types of bugs. Unfortunately, the project was not actively maintained and had architectural problems, so it was hard to implement all the ideas I had. For some time, I tried to write my own static analyzer, but later I took the opportunity to join the IntelliJ IDEA team.