What happened so far:

• A month ago Atlassian officially became a Besloten Vennootschap in Netherlands. We are an "Atlassian B.V." now. Jeffrey wrote about that.
• Three weeks ago we have moved into our new office on a beautiful Herengracht canal. According to wikipedia this is the most elegant one of the major canals of Amsterdam. All you can ever want European beer and/or chocolate is just around the corner too. Josh wrote about that.
• Two weeks ago I arrived in Amsterdam to discover that Josh and Jeffrey have been busy putting together some temporary IKEA furniture. The office really feels like a startup at the moment. Three desks, five chairs, a telephone and two laptops. Days are filled with juggling all kinds of jobs to settle in a new place and make it feel like home!

What else has been happening?

• Last week I learned more about VOIP and SIP and IP-PBX than I ever wanted to. Not that for a geek like me it wasn't fun!
• This week is about properly connecting and patching through our router, switch, VOIP system and video conferencing. Also nice and geeky tasks. Hours of uninterrupted entertainment.
• There will be lots of other things to work out surely. They are still 'unforseen'

So what is the interesting part then?

Atlassian offices in Sydney and San Francisco have build a super fun atmosphere. Each office has its unique aura. Every event is special and causes much envy in the office over the ocean.

We also have a huge number of people that know, use and love our products here in Europe already. We will be having them over for visits. A lot of fun to be had!

The bar is pretty high and we are really exited with possibilities. Everyone who will be part of the initial team here in Amsterdam will really be part of this startup-like environment of building the local office culture ground up. Isn't that a rarest chance? Not only to work for a great company but to build it's new home from scratch!

What would you like the culture of this new home to be?

Last week my RSS reader was regularly ticking over with posts from the FishEye team working on video presentations for their upcoming release. I thought I should get my contribution out first:

(Warning: makes even less sense without sound)

Atlassian is hosting our first ever worldwide developer conference, AtlasCamp! AtlasCamp is a 2-1/2 day user conference exclusively for developers in the Atlassian community --our engineers, external plugin developers, and partners and customers interested in developing plugins for our products.

AtlasCamp is an opportunity to come together in a casual environment for a little learning and a lot of fun. We've published a tentative schedule for the weekend. Some highlights will be sessions about Plugins 2.0, upcoming features and APIs in JIRA 4 and Confluence 3, and a roundtable about our Remote API strategy There will be time set aside for un-conference sessions, as well as a general hackathon.

AtlasCamp is a developer conference, primarily of interest to people who have some experience writing plugins for Atlassian Software. The sessions will be more technical than would interest regular users or admins. But don't worry, there will be more opportunities for the general audience in the near future.

The number one goal of AtlasCamp is to bring our plugin development community to one place so that we can build face to face relationships with each other. So there's plenty of time built in to hang out, relax and socialize. I hope every attendee comes away with a network of new friends to call on, collaborate with, ask for help, and support developing innovative new plugins (or even businesses) around Atlassian products.

This conference is about the community, so we're asking for you help to make it great. Please go to the AtlasCamp wiki page and suggest topics that you'd like to hear about, or topics that you'd like to present.

The event will be held in Santa Rosa, California, approximately 50 miles north of San Francisco. We are exploring transporation options from San Francisco International Airport and will announce the details shortly.

Due to the size of the venue, attendance is strictly limited, so you should reserve your spot as soon as possible.

For all of the up-to-date information including location, lodging and agenda and to RSVP visit http://www.atlassian.com/atlascamp.

See you there!

I needed a way to bulk add users from one group to another in Crowd this week. The problem was basically that not all members of a 'staff' group in Crowd were also members of a 'jira-users' group which was causing problems with logins in JIRA.

Since Crowd's UI doesn't support bulk operations yet, doing it via its Remote API was the only option. I decided to implement this in Ruby for no particular reason other than that I wanted to play with another language. Ruby turned out to be surprisingly quick to learn actually.

Read on for the full implementation details...

Continue reading "Bulk User Management with Crowd's Remote API" »

Just in time for JIRA 3.13 release (release notes), JIRA Issues Bucket plugin version 2.0 of this plugin is released as well (release notes).

This is a major productivity improvement. Some of the annoyances are taken care of now:

Filter out updated issues where the author of the last update is current user

In a typical way, when going through the bucket, I would open the issue in a new browser tab, so I would still have my bucket open and did not need to navigate back to it. That means that once the issue was actioned, I would go back and remove it from the bucket. However, because I just updated that issue, in few moments later the very same issue would re-appear in the bucket.

Not, anymore. You can select an option to exclude your updates from re-entering the bucket.

See BUCKET-21 for more information.

Issue view page operation that will allow for issue removal from a bucket

If you follow the process as described above, you will find it easier to remove the issue from the bucket directly on the view issue page. Once you are done, you can close that tab and refresh the page with the bucket. Done. No more looking to the "just actioned" issue in the list of issues in the bucket just so you can click the little trash icon.

See BUCKET-16 for more information.

Compatibility

This version uses new JIRA 3.13 API, therefore it won't run on older versions of JIRA. Also, as JIRA drops support for Java 1.4 in the future major release (4.0), this plugin steps ahead and only supports Java 5.

See BUCKET-29 for more information.

Shareable buckets

As the dashboard pages are now shareable we had to make this feature work as well. So now, if you share the page with your bucket, other users will be able to see what's in your bucket. Respecting the permissions, if you don't own the bucket, you cannot do anything with it (read-only). And also you can only see the issues that you have permission to see. Keep in mind that as a result there could be more issues in the bucket than you can actually see.

See BUCKET-30 for more information.