Spiff up your site, blog or instance with one of our new product badges.

Thanks for the support.

If you've visited www.atlassian.com lately you've seen the rainbow. Last week we updated the product sections on our site and:

• gave each product its own colour. Here's how the JIRA homepage looks now (left) and before:




• stuck in links where you can find them:


(In case you were wondering, that's our president wearing the bear hat. One day that picture surfaced on our intranet dashboard. We had to use it. ;) )


• created 'Learn' pages to better introduce each product:




• and lots more, which collectively made up 1,581 file updates. (Many thanks to Zach, our webdev star!)

Geeky: entries written by our developers that discuss problems and solutions encountered while coding

Informative: tips and updates about Atlassian products, as well as plugin competitions, book reviews, user groups, and LOTS more

Hip: goes without saying anything seeing it's from Atlassian

That's why you might be swayed to subscribe to the monthly Atlassian newsletter.

If you need one more teaser, take our 'Our Reading List'. It highlights a few of the sites and blogs we share around the office*. Here's Our Reading List from April's issue:

* Cycle Gap shares an anecdote from Guy Steele about pair programming with Stallman back at MIT.
* Meet Atlassian staff in Interview with an Atlassian Nerdherder and Inside a Wiki Evangelist's Mind.
* Take part in a Shutdown Day, the largest global experiment.
* Michael Tokar's story of solving a JIRA support issue in Beware of Hash Cookies.
* This must have been a fun challenge: Super Mario in 14kB Javascript.
* Lifehacker shares some ways to Go Green with your Computer.

If you have similar interests and humour, sign up today.

*Disclaimer: not all entries are related to Atlassian. In fact, Our Reading List is often quite a random collection of links. Now that I mention that, our blogs aren't always related to Atlassian either. Hmm...

We're proud of our founders and wanted to share the news... Mike and Scott are part of Australian Anthill's Top 30 Entrepreneurs under 30 list.

Here's how Anthill's describes the Top 30 entrepreneurs:

These 'young guns' are switched-on, cashed-up and fearless. And if you haven't already figured this one out, they also represent the future of business in Australia.

And here's a fun, little excerpt included in the article (bottom of page 2):

Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar started Atlassian after meeting at university and deciding that working for a large company just wasn't for them. They spotted a niche in the market for issue-tracking software, filled it, and went on to offer other project-management and enterprise collaboration tools. Ironically, they have ended up working for a large company, but it's not so bad when you own it.

On a related note, Robert Castaneda, a close friend and partner of Atlassian, also made the Top 30 list. Congratulations Rob!

Company culture and transparency are two important aspects of Atlassian. That's why we'd like to introduce you to various staff members though the Inside Atlassian Minds series. In this interview, let me introduce you to Brendan Humphreys.

Brendan came on board the development team when Atlassian and Cenqua joined forces last year. He focuses on Crucible and Clover. In this interview Brendan reveals the best dev tool, an underground chat forum at Atlassian, differences between the Cenqua and Atlassian cultures and more. Here's a snippet:

Clover helps determine what a test is actually testing. What's the most off-key code you've discovered, thanks to Clover?

"Off-key"?? Who wrote these questions? There's no magic around code coverage. It's not a silver bullet for software defects. It's just one of a number of tools a developer can use to improve their testing by getting detailed feedback from a test run. Ultimately you need to treat your test code with equal importance as your application code. Clover's aim is to provide as much insight into the testing effort as possible, so that writing meaningful tests becomes an easier thing for developers.

And that's just one question! Continue reading...

Continue reading "Interview with an Atlassian Nerdherder" »