"The most valuable commodity I know of is information."
rebelutionary / 2.0
Eating Raw Dog Food
Charles wrote up one of my worse meeting metaphors on our developer blog in his post Keep 'em clean boys.
Frustration when viewed in a blog post's cold light of day is a fascinating thing!
The salient point though is that the Confluence team is using the latest development code for our internal enterprise wiki.
We eat our own dogfood, even before it's fully cooked.
How?
Our extranet gets updated twice a week. We've worked hard to make the update process as painless as possible. It's two commands I believe and takes about 20 minutes to run, including doing a full backup of the data. If the process was more painful, we would naturally do it less. Building release discipline into a software team is a hard thing to do, this helps us get better at it.
Why?
The natural question people ask is "Doesn't that cost you money when bugs cause downtime / errors?".
The simple answer is "Yes, but it costs less than the support from 2,500 Confluence enterprise customers having the same downtime."
The longer answer is that because we know we're going to update twice a week, we try to keep our... code clean at all times. Developers know their code is going live very soon, so they don't leave loose ends hanging around.
No "90% complete" here.
Trackbacks
Mike Cannon-Brookes on how Atlassian update Confluence in-house: "It's two commands I believe and takes about 20 minutes to run, including doing a full backup of the data" They need to release that job - the last time I upgraded...
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About
I'm the co-founder and CEO of Atlassian.
I live in Sydney and San Francisco. I'm an Aussie. I travel (a lot). I learn. I read. I talk. I create. I bike. I drink. I'm all in.
This is my blog. Welcome!
Atlassian
Atlassian is a customer-driven software company, combining brilliantly simple tools with legendary service.
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Daily, over 10,000 organisations from 98 countries use our tools:
- JIRA - issue tracking, project management and workflow.
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- Crowd - single sign-on simplified.
- Crucible - efficient peer code review.
- FishEye - source code repository insight.
Oh, and we're always hiring. If you're reading this, there's a good chance you're our kind of person. See open positions.
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Advising startups is something I've started doing in the last year. It's a fascinating way to use one's brain and experience to solve other people's problems.
I'm loving it.
Besides the few I advise, I've invested in one, HomeThinking.
HomeThinking provides realtor reviews, ratings and metrics (qualitative and quantitive) for home sellers.
I also make a lot of small microfinance loans to entrepreneurs around the world through Kiva. Read more about my on going Kiva Challenge (update).
