This Monday as I was typing my way through a demo in front of 7 developers I noticed as I made typos, etc, that most of the comments were coming from the front row. Turns out after I talked to several people in the class that it was hard to read code in 12pt type at 1024×768, especially from the back row.
So far I’ve found two fixes. I can change the default font size to about 16pt in IntelliJ IDEA or since I’m on a Mac I can set the universal accessibility option to zoom to about 1.5 times when I hit the Apple-option-equals combo. I’ll probably just go with the 16pt size option though