Atlassian Conference Overview



    This is an overview of the Atlas Camp conference, which was held from 5 to 8 September in Barcelona. It was organized by Atlassian to talk about innovations in its products and for direct communication between Atlassian developers and visitors. The speakers talked about future changes in their API, how their marketplace will evolve, about changes in the interface and best practices in development. In addition, the conference program included presentations from companies developing the most successful and important plugins.

    Since quite a large part of my automation tasks is related to Atlassian products (at the moment it is Confluence and Jira, and before that I had to deal with Crucible, Fisheye, Bitbucket), I was wondering what innovations will appear soon in their API. In addition, I wanted to listen about interesting plugins and learn more about developing my own. Under the cut a detailed report on what I finally saw and learned, as well as other important organizational issues.

    Everything in order


    Pro tickets . Tickets were only one type (for 768 euros, including VAT). They gave the right to visit all the halls, buffet and merch (issued stickers and a T-shirt for free, all the other nishtyaki were sold).



    About the site. The conference was held in a hotel near the metro Fira. Very convenient location for both the airport and the city. Halls for reports are spacious, comfortable, everything is audible and visible. True, on the first day of the conference technical problems arose with the transformation of one large hall into two small ones, due to which some reports were postponed to the morning of the next day. On a very early morning, therefore, only a few of them visited - only those who really needed it. The hall where food was organized (buffet) was essentially a hall through which the audience passed to the halls with reports. Because of this organization of space, the crowds there were permanent.



    About the hotel. I settled in the hotel Fira Congress. Convenient location from the airport, metro and 500 meters from the conference venue. Good breakfast, decent rooms. But I personally didn’t have enough blankets. I understand everything: the southern country is always warm, but still somehow comfortable under the blanket. Yes, and the windows they are not tight (in the case of heavy rain can leak water).



    Pro navigation. On the first day of the conference at the entrance we were met by a woman who literally pointed with her finger where to go for registration. Before each hall there was a sign with a schedule of events in it. In addition, the conference has a mobile application in which you can create your plan of events, and then 10 minutes before the start of the selected reports, a reminder comes to the phone with an indication of what hall is taking place. Also in the app are published news of the event and other useful information. And it also acts as the Atlassian social network: in it the conference participants exchange impressions and post photos.



    About the schedule. The conference opened at 9 am. At this time, the coffee points worked at the site and the developers of the organizer were on duty, so that it was possible to communicate with them. The reports themselves began at 10 am, and the performances ended at 6 pm.



    About the reports . Reports went in 4 streams. In addition, in a special room, the developers of plug-ins in round-table mode were organized, another hall was allocated to communicate with Atlassian developers in one-to-one format. Anyone could sign up for a meeting with a particular developer in advance by first sending their questions through a special form in which the meeting time was automatically set.

    In general, the reports were interesting even to those who do not develop plug-ins, because most of them were about various best practices in development.

    At the keynote, the technical director of Atlassian Sri Viswanath (Sri Viswanath). He talked about what's new for application developers under Atlassian and what else is planned to be done.

    Patrick Streule (Patrick Streule), Atlassian Systems Architect, in his report on the Atlassian Document Format, tells you about the new documenting format - Atlassian Document Forma t (ADF). This is useful to know if your application is reading / writing something from Atlassian products, because now it’s the same format for all their products. Patrick also mentioned the need to get started with the new format (libraries, tips, techniques, etc.).

    Stefan Kleineikenscheidt, co-founder and CEO of K15t Software, made a very interesting report on the subject I developed an App and OMG, Now I'm Running a Company! He told how a whole company of 50 people grew from one plug-in, which develop and maintain 3 of the top 10 plug-ins for Confluence. The report was divided into several parts about different periods of the company's life (as he came up with which application to write; how the team assembled; what to do when the team is assembled and the company is working at full capacity).

    I didn’t like the report from Atlassian developer Ian Buchanan called Getting Git Right. He spoke about the internal structure of Git and some tricks, but it all seemed already outdated, and it was impossible to get something new from the report.

    There was also an interesting talk from Atlassian Chief UX Designer Kelly Snow (Kelly Snow) about how important it is to make it so convenient for users to install and configure applications. She also gave some practical advice on how to implement it.

    My personal opinion : you need to go to the conference itself only if you are a developer of plug-ins for Atlassian products or are going to become one.















    About merch . During registration, in addition to promotional brochures, were issued T-shirts. Another merch (bags, mugs, t-shirts with different prints) was paid. I did not buy anything, because I did not like anything visually.



    About food . At one o'clock lunch was served in the format of a buffet table. From the hot were only mini-burgers. But the food was enough, so it was not necessary to look for where you can eat extra for money. If to understand, all food was in the form of tapas, traditional and habitual for Spaniards. Even soups (cold) were served as snacks - they were poured into something very similar to glasses. On the first day, two halls were set aside for lunch, the second buffet lines were moved to the hall and fed right near the entrance to the conference halls. Actually, in this hall they constantly updated snacks and drinks, so it was not necessary to starve, and to stand in line for food too.



    Conference Organs on the note. Before each hall there was a large stand with a QR code, by clicking on which one could immediately access the slides. Very comfortable, especially when you sit in the back row, and in front of you are tall Scandinavians.

    About the difficulties of translation . All the speakers spoke English, but there was no difficulty with understanding, although I do not have quite fluent English. There would be no difficulties for those who speak not very well, but they are well aware of technical terminology.

    About listeners . Most of the listeners were plugin developers. It is difficult to assess the level of their qualifications, but I have not heard stupid questions. Many of them came with already prepared questions on urgent topics.

    The organizers did not report how many participants they managed to gather at their conference, but, according to my feelings, there were no more than 500 people. People came from all over the world. Atlassian sought by all means to show their openness to third-party developers, the desire to communicate and help. In general, there was easy navigation, and the application was generally the most convenient feature for conferences, which greatly simplified life.



    Council experienced . At the Atlas Camp conference I was interested, I learned a lot about the development of plug-ins for Atlassian and, perhaps, still try myself in this. Nevertheless, the innovations heard are unlikely to help me in my current tasks.

    I think this conference is primarily designed for communication between plug-in developers and Atlassian, for sharing experiences. If you are engaged in automation using their products, then in the framework of the official program you can hardly find out something new, but in the framework of informal (and very well organized) communication with developers you can solve almost all your questions. But is it worth paying 768 euros for this? It seems to me that this is “that mache.” Although, as they say, "that hum".


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