Jonathan Nolen

On Tuesday, I left the comfort of my tidy little office for a 14-hour plane flight -- to adventure! Yes, that's right: your faithful correspondent is in Sydney now. I'm camping out with the Atlassian development team, most of whom I met for the first time when I arrived on Thursday. (I completely skipped over Wednesday, thanks to the wonder and mystery that is the International Date Line. But that's ok: I think my life can do with fewer Wednesdays altogether.)

First thoughts: 1) It's Spring here. Weird. It's wet and muggy and a little bit hot. It was just starting to get cold in California. 2) Jet-lag hasn't been bad so far. I crashed a little early last night, but I was able to sleep normally and woke up only slightly earlier than normal this morning. Which probably means that it's going to kill me on the way back. 3) Laksa is really good. I don't know why Asian restaurants don't have this in the States.

Adrian kindly found me a desk to call my own and Mike scrounged up an Aussie-ended charger for my PowerBook. Then I nicked an Aeron chair from the temporarily-absent Scott. And just like that, I was in business.

Development is really humming down here. The JIRA team is revving up for the release of JIRA 3.4.


The JIRA Team, coding with quiet fervor.

And the Confluence team is homing in on the release of Confluence 2.0 (The Confluence release formerly known as 1.5).


The Conf Team, crackling with mental energy.

As I type, the whole Confluence team is heads-down, trying to correct the last few failing tests so that they can get the first Release Candidate out the door before the weekend. They dev teams work in two large, open areas: one for each product team. I've seen a lot of pair-programming going on, though it's not fully XP-style pairing; everyone still has a computer (or two) of their own. But folks are swapping desks like mad right now, matching up in different pairs in order to fix the last few bugs.

The Wall of Death is down to a handful of issues now. (One of which I filed, and still isn't fixed. I'll have to speak to someone about that.) The count will surely go back up after the RC gets some public use, but it feels like they're really close. 2.0, here we come.


The Wall of Death Closure. Notice all the empty space.

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