Monthly Archives: November 2008

Wiki4k

At the Melbourne Cup lunch, Matthew Jensen and I were talking about the Java 4K competition, where you have to implement a game in Java where your resulting .jar file is 4KB or less. The competition harks back to the old 8bit demo scene where l33t - and mostly Eastern European - hackers created awesome graphics demos in pint-sized programs. We joked about how far you'd get if you tried to create a Wiki in 4k. This is a joke no more. Wiki4k Over the last couple of weekends I put together Wiki4k.

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Subversion replication at Atlassian

It's cool working for an international company with an open philosophy, but our decentralised setup can cause some real headaches for sysadmins. One of these is giving fast access the source-code repository to our developers and support staff spread over 3 continents, all working on a common code base. Subversion is the existing version-control system here, primarily for the tool support and well-understood workflow. But it's not without its problems, not least that its chatty-on-the-wire nature

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FedEx 9

We recently held Atlassian's ninth "FedEx" competition, and it's time to share the results with you. FedEx is an Atlassian tradition that requires a little explanation: Every 3 months or so, we put aside our regular development work for a day and a half, and work on our own crazy ideas. At the end, everyone gets three minutes to present their project to the rest of the company, and we all vote to determine the winner of the prized FedEx trophy. Why do we do this? We see a number of benefits: Firstly,

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Throbbers

Whenever I work with ajax requests, I always find throbbers more complex then I first anticipated. It is important to let the user know that there is an asynchronous request taking place, however if this request is fast and takes only a fraction of a second, the throbber is also displayed for a fraction of a second, appearing "flickery". One solution is to handle the response as soon as it is available but display the throbber for a minimum amount of time, avoiding the flickery appearance. The problem

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Sharks and the art of testing

At Atlassian we develop software using agile techniques so it's unsurprising that our work is infected with tests, but testing is not limited to just our work. Let's party! Recently I organised a bucks (bachelor/stag) party for my brother. As you do, we went swimming with Great White sharks. (After all making a lifelong commitment isn't so scary once you've looked death in the face). Hence nine of us travelled from Sydney to Neptune Island off the South Australian coast. There a large seal colony

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