Recent posts from Jay Simons

Black Friday, the Super Bowl, dinner with the in-laws - the holidays are always good for some competition. In keeping with that theme, the Atlassian San Francisco office decided to follow our annual Halloween pumpkin carving contest with an inaugural holiday gingerbread house building competition.

The rules: each team gets a bona fide gingerbread house kit, and $10 to buy supplies. Everything added to the house must be edible.

Before we get to the results, we thought we'd pass along a few tips from the experience:

• RTFM: those teams that thought making icing was a piece-of-cake (okay, strange pun) struggled. Add too much water and you run out of mortar; too little and the darn thing won't set.
• Gingerbread tastes really, really bad: a few of us got hungry during the build and tried to eat part of our houses. Trust us: it's not worth it.
• Don't wait until the last minute: the biggest underestimation most made was around how long these things take to build, especially when competing against people that are willing to pull out all the stops (see below for examples). If you want to win, start early. Nothing kills a good eggnog buzz like a caved in gingerbread roof.
• throw away the blueprint: following the box is going to yield you one very boring square gingerbread house, adorned with gumdrops and jelly beans. If you want to win this puppy, you have to go off-road. Just when everyone is expecting you to pull out the little ski chalet with marshmallow topping, you throw down the Taj Mahal with stained glass from melted Jolly Ranchers. Dream big.

So, without further adieu, the results of the inaugural Atlassian gingerbread house competition:

Admirable entries that didn't win:
Lots of great ideas here, and some very creative use of materials.

First up, the Polar Bear House. Surprised this team pulled this out, considering the Polar Bear ate up half of their $10 allowance.

A Gypsy caravan. Technically, the x-mas lights aren't edible, but we let it slide.

A bunch of us like to play board games during lunch, so the House of Cards house won some votes:

A tribute to our Amsterdam office, the Redlight District House, complete with a risque silhouette etched from a fruit roll-up and snow people embarrassing themselves:

The Golden Gate Bridge house, with two halves of lettuce representing the Marin Headlands and Presidio, and blueberries representing the rough waters of the bay.

This was a close runner-up, an almost exact replica of our office building at 375 Alabama Street in San Francisco. The bus in front was actually parked outside of the office that day.

And the winner:
The Beach Chalet house, with roof of bay leaves, a blue ocean of jello powder, and a beach of brown sugar.

Not sure what we'll do for Valentine's Day, but holidays around this office certainly aren't dull. Happy holidays from Atlassian.

This morning we had a little bit of a snafu. A customer, with the best of intentions, added the entire JIRA User Group to the Cc Group field - a custom field created for our JIRA instance - of their support issue on support.atlassian.com. They didn't realize that this group has more than 30,000 members. When they hit save they triggered a tsunami of email notifications that landed in the inboxes of thousands of other unsuspecting customers. Man, were we embarrassed.

We sent an apology out to the customers who received those emails - many among you - explaining what happened and assuring folks that we fixed the issue by removing the "Cc Group" field on support.atlassian.com. But we also wanted to explain a bit about how that field is used, why it wasn't disabled before, and other ways to achieve the same outcome now that this field is disabled.

What is the Cc Group field?
The "Cc Group" is a custom field that was created for our JIRA support instance, and used internally by Atlassian and by a select group of customers to update a group of JIRA users about a specific ticket. Once Cc'd on a ticket, the group will receive notifications regarding any status changes and/or updates. However, enabling this provided access to global groups such as jira-user, which contains all JIRA users. We hadn't removed it before because it was being used by customers, and because we simply didn't consider a customer adding all users of the system to the Cc field.

Hey, I was using that. What can I do now?
We have now removed the "Cc Group" field, so this can no longer happen. But there is a workaround. If you were using the "Cc Group" field, you can achieve the same result by creating an internal email alias containing each of the users previously in your JIRA group on support.atlassian.com. Instead of using the "Cc Group" field you can use the "Cc User" field with the new alias.

Again, we're sorry for the extra email so many of you received, and we've definitely fixed it. Back to your previously scheduled program.

Man, we had fun with this one. Our Cash for Clunkers program ran for only three short weeks, but we accepted 427 clunker trade-ins, and there were some doozies. So many in fact that we've decided to add a few extra awards, in addition to the $4,000 grand prize for the best trade-in. We're giving a special edition JIRA 4 t-shirt to the three additional award winners.

So, without further adieu, we bring you the Cash for Clunkers Awards Ceremony. Cue drum roll...

The Don't Try This @Home Award

Clunker: Pen and Paper
Description: It is useless, other than as a to-do list -- not tracking anything, not shareable, meaningless scribbles out of context. Plus, I can't put it in my pocket because of the spirals. Frankly, I'd be happy with an upgrade to a Moleskine.

The Most Creative Bug Tracker

Clunker: the Wife
Description: She nags, nags, nags until I get things done. There's no prioritisation, no MIS to show her how much has been achieved just that constant whining about when I'll get the next job done.

The Best Rant

Clunker: Easyprojects.net
Description: The very definition of clunker oozes thoughts of slow and clumsy with a little bad design mixed in... which happen to be the 3 keystones of EasyProjects. I'll miss brewing coffee while waiting for pages to render, idiotic use of ajax and the all-too-often server errors. Maybe it will be the clicking on white-space to get pop-up menus that I'll miss.. after all, it took me a year to remember these tricky user interface tidbits. Well.. after making coffee and extolling the virtues of the beach ball of death, the ridiculously fast and refined Jira simply makes me mad... mad that I wasted two years trying to get back the investment I made, the compromises, the defending of its usage to my co-workers. Alas, Jira, thanks for showing me how good it can be.

And the Grand Prize Winner for Best Trade-in

Clunker: HP Quality Center
Description: Many, many things frustrate us about our current clunker. Just as important as switching to JIRA though, if we win the $4,000 we will donate every penny to a local cancer research institute called Roswell Park. To describe why we're switching, we wrote a poem called 'Twas the night Before Beta' which is a parody of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas'. The names in the sixth stanza are the names of the software engineers on our team. We hope you have as much fun reading it as we did writing it:

'Twas the night before beta, when all through the app
Not a bug had been fixed 'cause Quality Center is crap;
Our product was written and developed with care,
In hopes it would just work, that bugs would be rare.

The engineers toiled away while wishing for their beds,
While visions of missed deadlines danced in their heads;
With our boss lurking the halls, and us under the gun,
Our brains could not settle, our work was not done.

When into my Inbox there arrived such a letter,
I sprang over to Outlook to see if the news was any better;
Opening the message I clicked in a flash,
It was a note from Atlassian, we could send QC to the trash!

I opened the new email, stunned by the sight,
Ran to my co-worker, and shared my delight;
When, what to our wondering eyes should appear,
It was news of JIRA 4 Beta, and Final was near!

With brand new features, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment this product was slick;
More rapid than eagles, JIRA's benefits arrive,
It reports, it tracks... HP QC will never survive.

"Now Andre! Now, Tracy! Now, Faisal! Now Glenn!
On, Mark! On, John! Let the fixing begin!
JIRA can prioritize those issues that call!
Now code away! Code away! Code away all!"

As defects that before in wild Mercury got lost,
They become clear in JIRA for one-tenth of the cost.
So up to the top of the list JIRA flew,
Chock full of new features, and a few Aussies too.

And then, in one click, the download began,
Byte by byte, the solution was nearly at hand.
As I drew in my head, and was smiling with glee,
Down to the filesystem JIRA was delivered to me.

From the top to the bottom, it was designed to be agile,
It is nothing like QC, which is bloated and fragile;
A bundle of toys like dashboards and searching,
Custom workflows, and plugins, and real-time reporting.

My eyes - how they twinkled! I grinned from ear to ear!
JIRA will save the project! JIRA has no fear!
This droll little issue tracker delivered with a bow,
Hurry, back to work now before morning's glow!

The hour was late as we installed JIRA 4,
Weary eyed but encouraged onward we bore;
Rapidly now our path forward became clear,
We organized our issues and then let out a cheer.

JIRA was flexible and robust, what trackers should be,
We hung our heads in shame, for even considering QC!
But we came to our senses, and found what is right,
To help us produce, and stay organized in our plight.

We spoke not a word, we went straight to work,
JIRA reported out issues without a single quirk.
Productivity doubled, Management is happy indeed,
For finally we have a tool, that does what we need!

We sprang from our cubes, to Atlassian gratitude poured,
Thanks to JIRA 4, Beta got out the door.
We heard our boss exclaim, as he drove out of sight,
"Our application is finished, and JIRA saved the night!"

So now we wait for cash, and decide how to spend,
Surely the money can help a hurting soul mend.
Cancer is a beast that sends families spinning,
Roswell Park Cancer Institute will get all of our winnings!!

This may be too American of an analogy, but Peanut Butter and Jelly is simply a great combo: two great tastes, that taste great together. Zendesk, the guys that put the Buddha in Customer Service, recently announced integration with JIRA that looks equally tasty.

Zendesk offers an on-demand customer service and support tool for companies of all shapes and sizes. It's designed to delight both the end users who create service requests and the help desk staff who support them. Zendesk is loaded with features and we love their slick sensibility. And they seem to be taking the world by storm, lining up a pretty sexy list of customers.

Often the really thorny requests a help desk deals with involve the engineers that wrote the code, and the systems used to manage issues, defects and features requests associated with that code. This is the peanut butter and jelly part: combing the two can create a pretty tasty support and customer service experience.

Zendesk announced recently the Zendesk Updater Plugin for JIRA , which is available at our freshly updated Atlassian Plugin Exchange. Put simply, the plugin links Zendesk tickets with JIRA issues, and helps a software developer using JIRA, and a customer service representative using Zendesk, work together on common ground simply. When an engineer or product manager updates the status, or comments on a JIRA issues, it's reflected automatically in the Zendesk ticket linked to that issue. And a customer service representative can create a JIRA issue, and assign it to the appropriate software developer, and automatically link it to the Zendesk ticket. Pretty slick. And Zendesk has open sourced the plugin, so you can grab the source if you want to tweak it.

The sun has set on Atlassian Summit, our first ever worldwide user conference, and what a wonderful ride it's been. We oversold the event, assembling close to 400 people in San Francisco, for two days of training, content-stuffed breakout sessions, demos, mingling, and of course a bit of beer-chugging. Some of the highlights:

• loads of product announcements: we let loose a thunderstorm of announcements, shipping a shiny, new Confluence 3.0, and releasing betas of JIRA 4.0, FishEye 2.0, Crucible 2.0 and Crowd 2.0, all game-changers. Plus, the acquisition of GreenHopper; new pricing for Studio, our hosted agile development suite (with GreenHopper now included); the launch of our Agile @ Atlassian site (where our developers share their experiences around our own agile development practices); an exciting new connector for the Eclipse IDE; our incredibly gorgeous Plugin Exchange; and, finally, demonstrations of our ambitious plans for OpenSocial in the enterprise. Boom!


• a mountain of Tweets: the Tweeters were chirping up a storm at Summit. My personal favorite was from a customer, sitting in the back, who misread the filename of "pom.xml" in a code sample:
  

  Note to #atlassiansummit presenters: if you're gonna show your source code repo, make sure "porn.xml" doesn't show up in the file list.




• Summit Bash at Atlassian's Offices: we pimped out our pad, complete with a giant race track where Atlassian and customers could battle each other Formula One style. I got my clock cleaned by several customers, and filed a bug in JIRA against car # 32. Man, the cable car bus ride home was chilly.


• Partners galore: we couldn't have pulled this off without the support of incredible partners. And that community let fly with a cavalcade of announcements, from an iPhone client for Confluence to new ninja-worthy plugins to a brand-new enterprise-grade cloud computing platform. Thanks again, sponsors. You rock!

To those that joined us, we hope you learned tons, met other customers, partners and Atlassians you can lean on going forward, and generally had a great time. Sound off in the comments! To those that couldn't make it this year, we have good news: we recorded the entire two days, and we'll pull together the complete show online - videos and presentations - early next week so you can experience the entire event from the comfort of your web browser (minus the free beer, of course).

As a quick teaser, we've published the Atlassian keynote below. We'll be breaking it down into digestible sections when we take the show online, so you can grab just the bits you're interested in, but for now you can scan through 90 minutes of the opening session.

We hope to see *all* of you next year.