Atlassian Summit 12 in San Francisco

    Since 2009, Atlassian , the manufacturer of the well-known issue-tracker JIRA and the corporate wiki Confluence, has been holding an annual event called Atlassian Summit .

    This event is aimed at delivering the latest news about the development of the company and its products to users and partners, listening to just useful presentations and, of course, communicating with each other.



    By tradition, the Summit is held in San Francisco, where one of the company’s offices is located, and this year I was there for the first time. I want to share with you a little news from the world of Atlassian, and just impressions.



    I got to the Summit, I can say, "for free." Atlassian hosted the Bamboo Task Master contest last year, which consisted of writing extensions for Bamboo - the Continuous Integration system. And I (with the invaluable help of my colleagues) won this competition with Bamboo VMWare Plugin , which allows you to start and stop virtual machines with test benches before and after assembly.



    Of course, the cost of visiting the Summit is significantly less than the cost of travel and accommodation, but still nice :) The

    summit took 3 days - from May 30 to June 1. The first day was devoted to trainings and informal acquaintance, and the other two days passed under the banner of reports and lightning talks (short but useful presentations).

    Event at Concourse Exhibition Center, which, incidentally, is located near the Atlassian office. The weather was pretty warm, but the incessant wind was a little unnerving.

    The first day


    I did not attend trainings (they were oriented more to beginners), so on the first day after a walk in San Francisco I came straight to registration.



    A very convenient badge was issued at the registration, inside which the program of the event was packed, which perfectly saved from the need to delve into the bag in search of a schedule. And, of course, the badge was two-sided, so there was no need to think if he had turned over to his interlocutor on the empty side. Organizers of local conferences, wind up!





    Immediately after registration, a guest package was issued, inside which there was a thermos with the logo of one of the sponsors, a thermos mug with the Bitbucket logoand some more little things. By the way, on the way back, I was even a little worried so that the American border guards, while “shining through” my bag at the airport, would not take a shell-like thermos for something else, but it cost.



    The first day was remembered by communication with sponsors, whose “booths” were forced into the central part of the exhibition complex, as well as communication with colleagues and users. Although for some, he probably was more remembered for free sushi.



    By the way, from the territory of the former Union there were St. Petersburg colleagues from ALMWorks , whose stand was quite popular. Well, if someone else was from the Russian-speaking population, then note in the comments, it will be interesting to hear your opinion.



    After the “semi-official” opening, a completely unofficial part followed in the form of a party in one of the nearby bars, again organized by one of the sponsors. I did not stay at this party for a long time, because there is not so much health, and soon I went for a walk and rest before the next day.

    Second day




    The second day of the Summit with his speech was opened by one of the founders of the Atlassian Mike Cannon-Brookes.

    He talked about a new strategy for Enterprise clients. Atlassian has finally begun to provide fast and 24/7 support for large and clumsy customers. They boasted of their cloud service of their own OnDemand applications , which, since the announcement last fall, has already gained nearly a million users.



    We were pleased with the news that coming soon JIRA 5.1 will be even faster than 5.0. The performance gain relative to 4.4 is expected to be almost 2.5 times.

    Officially unveiled at the Atlassian Marketplace, which is essentially a continuation of Plugin Exchange, a service for posting and downloading plugins, but with a convenient opportunity to sell your commercial plugins right there. By the way, the ability to use a ready-made licensing and payment system will cost the developer 25% of the money earned. This is less than in the AppStore or GooglePlay, but still tangible.



    In this situation, with a spoon (and someone else’s scoop) of tar, it seems that the Marketplace does not work with all countries . And of course, exUSSR was left overboard. On the sidelines, Atlassian representatives boasted that they still work with countries where 95% of customers are located, and when they asked “when will we be here too”, they shrugged and answered “when you no longer require printing on every piece of paper.”

    But enough about the sad. During its existence on the Exchange / Marketplace, more than a thousand plugins have been downloaded and three million user downloads of plugins have been made. 59 (and probably more already) of all the plugins are already available for purchase through the new Marketplace. For Western simple users, the Marketplace will provide an opportunity to “synchronize” all their licenses so that you can pay for all products and plug-ins at the same time, and not throughout the year.

    Among other things, Mike boasted that the company had already grown to 500 people and continues to gain momentum. Atlassian is not the first year on the market, and I think it will not be difficult for them to overcome the next growth problems.

    After Mike, Jeff Ma performed , known for beingMIT Blackjack Team , which with the help of its mind left the casino (no, not intellectual, ordinary) without money. Even now I find it difficult to say what the main idea I wanted to convey to Jeff (probably that the team is cool), but listening to it was very interesting.



    After Jeff, we were told a little more interesting about the upcoming Confluence 4.3. In this version, new notifications appeared in real time right on the page, thanks to which you do not need to climb into the mail and watch what happens. There was a simple but nice opportunity to keep lists of tasks - both personal user and general on the page, in the form of a check list. Of the new products there is a mobile version of Confluence, which, in essence, consists in the fact that mobile devices are given a specially reformatted page, where extra elements are removed, fonts are enlarged, and pictures and tables are extended across the width of the screen. It looked pretty good.

    Currently you can download 4.3 EAP (Early Access Program) and read the current version of release notes



    Then came the turn of the event called Launchpad, where the sponsors had 5 minutes to tell the audience about their product. And the audience gave the speakers instant feedback, immediately after the report, voting via SMS or on the site. The hall, as expected, was torn up by performances that had the most non-standard design - at Gliffy they were pirates,

    and Stepstone (Zen Foundation) complained about the hard life in a straitjacket.



    Although it should be noted that some of the sponsors took the Summit as an excuse to read a piece of paper tediously and without a twinkle to talk about their product. So for some of them, the number of customers could even decrease.

    Next came lunch, at which Atlassian did the original and drove to the building several of the so-called Food trucks of fast-food chains popular in the city. By the way, fast did not mean poor or tasteless at all. And the place for communication was not bad.



    And upon closer inspection, the “inconspicuous" Zynga office was found nearby.



    After lunch, I was mainly in the Confluence sections and found out that in 4.3 they promise a built-in sorting of tables, according to which people suffer a lot, starting from 4.0. And finally, drag'n'drop images and macros on the page. There was also talk of an “instant editor” that will open without reloading the page (as in 4.2 done for comments), but in 4.3 EAP I have not seen this yet. Perhaps it was just "thinking out loud."

    Then I moved to another of my favorite sections - plug-in development, but there were already discussed things that loading the public does not make much sense. If anyone is interested in this, then I will tell in the comments or in PM.

    The so-called AtlasBar worked on the second floor of the exhibition center, where everyone could come up to Atlassian employees and consult on issues of interest to them.



    The second day ended with another party in the Embarcadero area near the bay.



    Day three


    The next day showed that the party was good, although over time enough people pulled themselves up.



    This day began with a performance by the second founder of Atlassian, Scott Farquhar.



    It was immediately reported that the Atlassian initiative called FedEx Days , in which willing employees (and now not only employees) were given 24 hours to change their ideas, was changing its name. At the request of whom the name changes, it is quite obvious, but it is surprising that this name lasted so long without claims of the copyright holder. The new name gives originality and sounds like ShipItDays.

    Scott then drew attention to the growing popularity of DVCS. For example, according to surveys, last year 19% of Atlassian customers used DVCS, compared to 48% this year. Naturally, Stash was presented right away - a system for managing Git repositories within an enterprise.

    Then GreenHopper 5.10 (a plugin that adds Agile to JIRA) and the goodies of JIRA 5.1 were presented. Of the features that are noticeable to a simple user, there will be inline editing for virtually all displayed fields, and now it will not be necessary to run to edit mode and vice versa to change one value.

    Of the innovations of GreenHopper 5.10, which were described in one of the following reports, it is worth noting multi-design - now it will be possible to work with applications from different projects on one “board” and in one sprint. Plus, the Rapid board is now becoming the main one, and the current one is becoming additional under the name Classic board. Of the small, but convenient features - dotted display of the number of days that the application hangs on the "board".



    It was also very fun to watch a comrade from Rally sitting nearby and carefully taking notes :)

    And during the break between the reports, I managed to catch one of the founders of Atlassian and talk to him a little.



    Of the other reports on this day, one can note:

    From 0 - 100 Million with No Salespeople. Not a new, but useful idea that every employee of the company should be at least a little seller. But do not distribute the product to friends, like Oriflame bigwigs of the network business, but bring people information about your company and what interesting things they do. Atlassian, for example, has no sellers in the classical sense of the word; no one calls or writes to customers to buy the product. There is only a marketing team and an electronic system for selling products on the site. The customer always comes to buy it himself.

    Minecraft and JIRA: Behind the Scenes . Atlassian's Joe Clark has integrated JIRA and Minecraft . Although at first glance this exercise is useless, but it added to the laughing audience many minutes of life and unobtrusively introducedJIRA REST API



    How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse (Or Any Other Natural Disaster) Using JIRA . It was remembered that the speaker’s company has a “flash drive on duty” with JIRA installed there and a work plan in it in case of any unforeseen cataclysm, as a result of which the local network will fail. Naturally, if the network and server remain working, the same plan is in the standard JIRA.

    Workflow Magic . They talked about the JIRA Workflow Sharing Plugin , which saves administrators from the headache when moving the workflow (with all the pieces attached to it) from one JIRA installation to another.

    Questions session with Eric Ries, author of Lean Startup . The main conclusion: no one has canceled learning.



    In general, they promise to upload videos of all reports to the Network, so that those who wish can study what interests them in more detail.

    The last day ended with a party of Atlassian Experts - authorized Atlassian partners providing support, sale of licenses, customization and more for end customers. And I got there due to the fact that our small company just before the Summit received the status of Expert. The atmosphere was quite interesting and friendly, although most of the Experts clustered around their companies, which made it difficult for me, as a newcomer, in these ranks, although the event was still very pleasant.

    On the same, I take my leave and leave to write a post about visiting the Atlassian office, where everyone was invited to take an excursion after the Summit.

    See you soon!


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