At Atlassian, all developers end up doing a 2 week support rotation every now and then. It's a great opportunity to see first hand how all the buggy code I write as a developer ends up hurting customers and will hopefully provide an incentive to write less buggy code in the future ;). It is also a good time to come up with innovative little patches that help customers in the short-term, which can then be fed back into the product in the long run. This blog is about one such case.

During my last support stint one of our JIRA Studio support engineers brought a support case to my attention where customers where using the JIRA dashboard fairly heavily from iPhone and Android devices. Since their Studio instance got upgraded to JIRA 4.0, they could hardly use the dashboard anymore and apparently 2 gadgets were critical for their users in the field. The JIRA 4 dashboard includes a lot of javascript at the top of the page, and generates a lot of DOM elements dynamically with javascript. This generally isn't a problem on most modern browsers, but on a mobile device with limited CPU and memory it can make a website crawl.

Read on for a one file solution to this problem.

Continue reading "Help! The JIRA 4 dashboard is slow on a mobile device!" »

To help people connect with each other, we did setup a chat room at last years Atlascamp. 3 month have gone by since the event, but the chat room has still a number of active users and the discussions are not only entertaining, but often interesting and useful.

We thought this was great way for people to exchange experiences and knowledge. Therefore we've decided to setup a public IRC channel for the Atlassian community. Hopefully it will help people to connect and get to know each other, so if you run into a problem in the future, you'll have a network of developers you can ask for advice. Of course your friendly Developer Relations members will be around as well, so don't be shy and say hi.

How to join?

Use your favorite IRC client to join. Wikipedia has a whole list of clients to choose from. Internally we use Colloquy on Macs and mIRC on Windows computers. Additionally some of the regular chat clients are able to connect to IRC.

If you decided on a client, you will need to following details to join the IRC channel:

Server: http://freenode.net
Channel: atlassiandev

We are looking forward to seeing you there.

PS: Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/atlassiandev

The first Atlassian Doc Sprint will take place from Monday 22 to Wednesday 24 February 2010. It's happening in Sydney, in San Francisco and online. You are invited! If you can't join us in person, you can drop in on our daily webinar sessions, follow the buzz in our online chat room and subscribe to our email list.

What is a doc sprint?

It's an opportunity to develop some good tutorials quickly. A doc sprint is a short period of time when a group of people collaborate to write a specific set of documents. Our doc sprint will focus on plugin and gadget tutorials. We start with a good idea of what we want to achieve. Then we achieve it. If we think of more ideas during the sprint, we do them too. That's it.

What will we be doing?

Let's develop the plugin tutorials that we're missing. These will be awesomely valuable to your developer colleagues and immensely fun to develop. We'll also create some funky gadget tutorials. These will be even more mind-bogglingly, impossibly fun.

Learn while you write. We'll have some Atlassian developers on tap to help us over the sticky spots. Help us to make it easier for those who follow in your footsteps. Atlassian super-geeks are oft heard to exclaim:

Seriously, no-one ever reads the documentation!

And then they complain, usually in the very next breath:

I can't use this $@*$% API – their documentation sucks!

Funnily enough, it's only the technical writers who see the irony in the juxtaposition of these statements.

What else?

On top of all that awesomeness, we'll have some fun too. OK, maybe technical writers have a weird idea of fun. Really.

What will you get out of it?

• Eternal recognition as author. Your name will be displayed as author of the tutorial on the Atlassian documentation wiki.
• Kudos from the Atlassian tech writers. We'll write up our results on the Atlassian blog and we'll create a Doc Sprint Hall of Fame.
• Chocolate. Indubitably, there will be chocolate in there somewhere.

Join us

So come play with the Atlassian tech writers. We're the dudes that write the docs that rock. Help us get our documentation up to your own exacting standards. Take a look at the details, pick a chocolate middle name and sign up.

Good news, everyone: the migration to PStudio is complete! It took about twice as long as I had estimated, so I'm right on schedule (in engineering-time).

Before you go tearing off to check it out, please, I beg you, finish reading this post and read the documentation.

Here's where things stand tonight (Sunday 20/12/2009):

We're going to leave the old systems locked down for the time being. But consider the code-freeze tentatively lifted on the new system. Everything should be good-to-go in PStudio, but there's always the chance we'll discover some horrible screw-up over the next few days that would force us to roll back. So you might not want to do a whole lot of work that you'd be sad to loose. I imagine that after a week or so of burn-in time, we'll have discovered any major flaws. We'll be working to delete the old data and set up redirects next week.

Hopefully, you'll find that your accounts from the old systems were moved over intact. However, if not, you can use the "forgot password" feature to get a new password, or just sign up with a whole new account. This system is running on it's own, internal Crowd database, so what happens here won't affect you accounts on any other Atlassian Systems.

Read the documentation to find out more about user management and how to make sure you've got the correct permissions to work on your project.

There will definitely be some manual clean-up required. You can find out what to look out for by reading the documentation.

And lastly, read the documentation. Now go check it out:

Update 3: The migration is complete. Read the announcement here and the new PStudio how-to.

Update 2: Unfortunately, the migration is not still complete. I've successfully moved about 220 projects. There are about 30 to go. These 30 are the ones that have more complicated SVN histories that prevent them from being moved cleanly. I'll be working on those tomorrow.

I'm extending the maintenance window until tomorrow at 11pm. I'll update you again at that time.

Update: The migration is not complete, so I'm extending the maintenance window until tomorrow at 6pm. I'll update you again at that time.

Greetings from Atlassian!

I wanted to let everyone know that we plan to launch a new service for the Atlassian Developer Network in the next few days: Plugins Studio.

Plugins Studio will be a dedicated instance of JIRA Studio just for plugin developers. JIRA Studio provides the full set of Atlassian development tools:

• issue-tracking in JIRA
• wiki collaboration in Confluence
• source-code management through Fisheye and Subversion
• code review in Crucible and
• continuous integration in Bamboo

All of this is provided as a free hosted service. No need for you to worry about backups, upgrades or maintaining the development tools.

Plugins Studio (a.k.a. PStudio) will allow us to offer this full project infrastructure for any Atlassian plugin that wants one. PStudio will be available for open-source plugins provided by the community, plugins written by Atlassians, and even commercial plugins (contact me for details). PStudio will keep all of the crucial data about your plugins in one place, in an easily accessible and consistent format.

One of the major goals of this project is to successfully migrate as much of the existing plugin project data as possible. This has turned out to be quite a challenge, but we're finally ready to make the move.

For that reason, we're going to be locking down Atlassian's Developer SVN and Developer JIRA while we perform the migration. You won't be able to check-in or modify anything in these systems while things are locked down. You should still be able to browse JIRA or check out from SVN, however.

The lockdown may last as long as three days. I'm hoping that by scheduling this close the Christmas holiday, it will come at time of low activity. But please be prepared for an extended outage.

Once the migration is complete, there are several steps that you'll need to take:

• You should examine your project and make sure all the data was migrated. If we missed anyone (and we very well might) don't panic - just let us know and we should be able to bring your project over individually.
• Your code in subversion will have moved, so you'll need to do a fresh checkout.
• You'll need to update any URLs in your code (for example, in the POM file) to point to the new locations.
  We will be copying content from http://confluence.atlassian.com (CAC) to the new Studio instance, and you'll need to review and clean up that content (fixing URLs, primarily).
• You'll need to make sure that your collaborators are members of your project-group, so that they can continue contributing. (Or alternately, open up your project to everyone if you choose.)
• You need to look at the data in http://plugins.atlassian.com (PAC), and update any URLs to point to PStudio. (We'll try to do this automatically, but you should check and update manually any we miss.)

We'll send out another email when the automated portion of the migration is complete, and remind you to perform these steps.

Our maintenance window for this change will start today (12/17) at 11am PST and continue until 6pm PST the following day (12/18). If we have to extend the maintenance period beyond that, we will let you know by posting on the blog.

Thanks for your patience and assistance as we make the move!

Cheers,
Jonathan and the Atlassian Team