rebelutionary / 2.0

I'm back in SF for our User Group (last Thursday @ Stanford - thanks to everyone who came, fantastic UG!) and JavaOne next week.

We have a huge schedule for JavaOne this year - with 6 new product launches in the last three weeks in time for the show - JIRA Studio (the big one), Bamboo 2.0 (distributed builds, Confluence integration), Fisheye 1.5 (real-time per user line count graphs - sample), Crucible 1.5 (project pages, review searches), IDE Plugin 1.0 (our tools inside IDEA!) and Confluence 2.8 (new UI, dynamic page ordering).

Oh - and some pretty dang neat t-shirts to give away at the conference.

Come by our booth for a demo, or just to say G'day. We have a whole crew of Aussies (including both founders - in the same place at the same time!) here, along with staff from our SF office, here to answer your questions.

And speaking of that whole crew of Aussies, it wouldn't be JavaOne - or Australian - without copious pints of beer. So we're giving away free beer after CommunityOne. Monday night, May 5th @ the Thirsty Bear, 7.30 onwards. Call it the after party for the early birds.

(PS Extremely bad photo of me from the Stanford UG in our Atlassian 2008 shirt - our best t-shirt yet IMHO. Click to zoom in.)

As always, life became busy and I stopped blogging. Apologies!

A few Atlassian, life and (Atlassian + life) updates:

• Atlassian is doing a grand experiment in engineering with our 20% time trial - watch that blog if you're a software team, it's really going to be fascinating. We're being open.
• We've passed 10,000 customers and $3m in monthly sales, our products won 4 Jolt Awards in one year, Confluence is used to power the White House and we've opened an office in Poland which we're thrilled about. Expect great things from their Pazu project. Things are busy.
• In the last month I've been to FooCamp in NZ (which was utterly fantastic - I love Kiwis, they always put on fabulous conferences and werewolf is a new, twisted passion of mine), San Francisco, Poland, Adelaide and I'm currently sitting in sunny (but dark) Brisbane. I hate hotel rooms.
• For any JIRA customers, Beyond JIRA gives you a good overview of how all our tools tie together to provide simply the best development experience for technical teams. We're a Tina Turner for engineers.
• If you're a Maven 2 user, Sherali's series on how we use Maven 2 is pure gold. Become a Maven maven.

Beyond that, I'm going to bed and will (as always) endeavour to blog more. Do check out the 20% time blog as we're putting a lot of effort into it.

Having read a lot of resumes over the years, Jeffrey nails it in his post How to write a bad resume.

Most mortals can fit their background on one page. After about ten years of experience, you might merit a second page. Maybe. But think hard first. It might take 15 years before we need to hear it all.

I really don't understand the 3+ page resume fascination.

Charles replied with typical style from a developer's perspective:

I think what many people forget is that a résumé is an exercise in marketing. You’re trying to sell yourself to a prospective employer, but so often I get little more from a résumé than a dry list of technologies, and some useless self-assessments of the applicant’s ability.

I'll just point you to my post on Applying for a Java Job (and from the flip side if you're interested Startup Hiring) - tell me what you did in a resume!

"XYZ Corporation - Developer - Jun 2001-July2004" Thanks - very useful. What did you do? Did you make coffee for the architect and senior developers? Did you develop the documentation and help files? Did you design a brilliant three tiered, event driven system that blew the previous sytem's performance away by 100 fold? Tell me!

Now if all that hasn't scared you off, Atlassian is always looking for people (20+ open positions in Sydney and San Francisco) and specifically at the moment we're looking for a VP of Marketing.

I'm not usually one for blogging humour - but this video that one of our developers shot is hilarious :)

Like it? Digg it :)

In spite of the six thousand manuals on child raising in the bookstores, child raising is still a dark continent and no one really knows anything. You just need a lot of love and luck - and, of course, courage. - Bill Cosby, Fatherhood, 1986

Being a parent is at once hard and rewarding. It's a part joy, part frustration and always a learning exercise.

I am one of the two parents of Atlassian, the father of the crazy idea that became JIRA and a guy who bleeds Atlassian blue every damn day.

Today is a tough day to be me.

Yesterday we closed the top voted JIRA issue for Field Level Permissions (FLP) as "Won't Fix", with a long explanation as to why that is so. We communicated that it will not be included in JIRA for the next 18 months. As we expected, there's been varying reactions from across our community - mostly in the form of flames from users who really wanted this feature.

I can assure you this was a very difficult parenting decision for us to make. It was not taken lightly.

I know how many people want FLP. I know what they want it for. I know how hard and complicated it is to build nicely because I've tried (find me another system with the queryability, flexibility of JIRA and an equivalent FLP system to what's above and I'll send you a signed t-shirt).

I do believe that despite the votes, we have made the right decision for our 8,500+ customers.

A Digression

We recently did a big internal exercise at Atlassian to articulate what our values were. I say articulate on purpose because values aren't something you go into a room and decide on. They're in the founders, they're in the early employees, they transmogrify themselves throughout the organisational DNA. You don't decide on values, you articulate them.

So what did we articulate as our 5 core values at Atlassian?

Well, I love 'em. They're heartfelt, they're irreverent, they're cheeky, they're bold, they are us.

Atlassian Values

• Open company. No bullshit.
• Build with heart and balance.
• Don't fuck the customer.
• Play, as a team.
• Be the change you seek.

I could explain any one of these values in a long blog post. We're open. We try to be upfront and straight forward. We try to make hard decisions being passionate and evenhanded to all parties. We put customers first, we stick together, we have fun and we're trying to change the world in our own way.

We ran a number of different exercises to try to draw out these values, for example - the Mars Group is roughly "Imagine you're recreating the company on Mars. You can only send 5 employees. Choose which 5 you would send. Why did you choose them? What values do they share or exhibit?".

We ran the exercises separately with our senior management team and with a group of employees from across the company. Both had to come up with 5 values they felt embodied the company.

The most fascinating (and gratifying as a founder) thing about it was the huge overlap between the two lists the teams came up with (which were merged to become the above). The correlation was scary, they were almost exactly the same list.

Fear not - the DNA runs strong in this building.

Taking Tough Decisions

Values are only worthless if they're just stuck on a wall. They should be embodied in every employee, in every new hire, in your products and in all the company's dealings.

So how does the decision to close FLP stack up against our values?

• We're being open. We just can't do it at the moment and we don't think it's the best way to deploy our limited engineering resources for the next year. We're copping the negative reactions on the chin - we offer you no BS and hope for none in return.
• This decision was not easy to come to, but it needed to be made - one way or the other. We considered all the possible outcomes and stakeholders.
• Isn't this decision screwing the customer because we're not delivering a feature they want? I don't believe so. As a product company, we need to take decisions about where to deploy our engineers, what to build for the benefit of the thousands of JIRA customers. By not pursuing FLP, I truly believe we will deliver more value over the next year to those customers in aggregate.
• We aren't having fun nor playing today. Being roasted by customers is never fun - trust me. My inbox is an ugly sight. I understand the frustrations being vented on the issue. That said, we are a team on this. Despite all the discussions, arguments and heated debate over the issue - I stand with Brett, Anton and all the others in the decision made.
• I'm not sure Gandhi ever knew what an issue tracker was but I can only guess as to whether he would have wanted FLP.

Where does all this leave the users who feel aggrieved? I hope they know that we are learning a lot from this issue. We're learning how to serve customers better, how to be the open company we want to be (trust me - being open is hard) and how to better communicate our decision making and direction.

Judge us on this - certainly - but judge us on all that JIRA is, not just JRA-1330.

Call The Fire Department

Amongst all the flames and anger, there is some balance - and I really would like to extend a thank you to those users, like Mike Brevoort:

Though I'm very disappointed and Atlassian shouldn't have let this drag on for this may years,* I applaud them for at least making a decision, a decision that in their opinion is in the best interest of the product*. How many times have you been strong armed to produce a feature that our constituants have choosen to not listen to the downstream consequences? Then six months later the same people are complaining about all of the things you warned them about. Just like parents, we need to make the best decisions for our children. Hopefully they made the best decision.

It's time to move on, re-raise your more specific issues and if Jira doesn't fit your need without this feature, go find another tool. Again, I applaud Atlassian for not falling into the be everything to everybody trap.

I couldn't have put it better if I'd written it myself. We should have made this decision earlier - I completely cop that.

JIRA is a 5 year old this year - a toddler. Many of our dreams for this little chap haven't been fulfilled yet. I'm really excited about the new features we have coming down the pipeline in the next year. I hope you'll be excited by them too.

And please remember that all this only happens because Atlassian is such an open company. Try to vote for features with Oracle or Microsoft or Sun any other large software company.

If we didn't let users vote on their issues, read each others comments, interact and scream at us - we wouldn't have this problem. Would that be a better place to be? Hell no. I still believe the gain to us and to customers from being open is far greater than the pain from publicly letting your customers down.

We're trying to be the best parents we can be. Time will tell.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. - Oscar Wilde

I hope this explains our thinking. As always, I welcome your feedback - the love and the flames.

“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.” - Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

Today we're making a big announcement and we think we're in good company.

Apple did it ten years ago...

"We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft must lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win Apple has to do a really good job." - Steve Jobs (see the video)

Novell did it last year...

"CIOs want to focus on their business, and they want their suppliers to focus on improving operating system interoperability." - Novell's Open Letter To The Community

Sun did it a few months ago...

"Does it signal a strategic shift inside of Sun? No - we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Running, virtualizing and supporting Windows opens doors." - Jonathan Schwartz

We're partnering with Microsoft and releasing the SharePoint Connector for Confluence.

(I've also recently had a haircut - losing a few inches off the shaggy locks and thus making me look a little less like Jonathan Schwartz - which is good - because today I must sound a lot more like him. As Jonathan said - "Remain calm"! )

What is it?

Microsoft is today announcing two strategic partners at the Web 2.0 conference today to add improved social computing capabilities to SharePoint.

We're thrilled to be one of those partners, the other is NewsGator with their neat new SocialSites.

The beta of the SharePoint Connector for Confluence is downloadable now. (One thing we're doing differently to Microsoft - come on, I'm allowed one small jab - this is not a vaporware announcement.)

Here's a screenie of it in operation - here showing a Confluence page (with dynamic charts and more funky things) embedded within SharePoint. Note the "Edit in Confluence" link - only if you have Edit permission of course - and "Confluence" tab in the top left.

And another showing a Word document, stored in a SharePoint document list, that's securely embedded in a Confluence wiki page via a macro, opened with a single click inside Microsoft Office and saved back to SharePoint. Neat!

The Connector allows you to leverage the best capabilities of each application from within the other:

• embed rich Confluence wiki pages within SharePoint with a single click to edit
• display lists of documents from SharePoint within Confluence with a single click to edit in Microsoft Office
• search across both applications, navigate between them seamlessly with single sign-on from Crowd

(read more in our new, funky, Panic-inspired feature tour)

Why do it?

One word: customers.

We've had a lot of customers ask us how to get Confluence and SharePoint to work together - today we're providing the answer. For example, Accenture is a huge customer of ours and a partner. They deploy both SharePoint and Confluence to their customers - they can continue to do that, but now they can integrate them, search across them and embed content between them.

With over over 4,100 enterprise customers, Confluence is no market minnow - but by comparison SharePoint has over 80 million deployed seats. That's a lot of opportunity.

I'd like to echo again what Steve said:

"We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft must lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win Apple has to do a really good job." - Steve Jobs (see the video)

Confluence often competes directly against SharePoint, but they can also be extremely complementary. As I said in my presentation, the wiki market at the moment is such that the competition is not so much from other wikis but from email, shared drives, intranets and the like. It's about upsizing the pizza rather than taking two slices.

We think for customers that use both SharePoint and Confluence (and there are a lot of those), this Connector will be fantastic.

Other Thoughts

Partnering with Microsoft makes most entrepreneurs quake in fear. To be honest we've actually found the process to be quite pleasant. We're avidly a Java shop through and through, but that never came up as an issue. Everyone we dealt with at Microsoft was more than helpful whether it be on a marketing and a technical level - and for that I must thank them.

Web services were the real winner here as the entire integration is made possible by the SOAP stacks in .Net and Java, and the ultimate pluggability of Confluence and SharePoint.

Further Reading

If you want to find out more, you can read our press release, Microsoft's press release, the Connector website, or just download it today.

If you're at the Web 2.0 conference, Jonathan and I will be demonstrating the Connector at the Microsoft booth quite a few times over the next few days.

Come say "G'day" and let me know your thoughts - good, bad or indifferent.

Updates

• Dennis Howlett scribed Microsoft does the Atlassian pogo dance - "Unlike the marketing partnerships we usually see, this one has genuine utility."
• Jeffrey nailed the headline in David Kisses Goliath and covers more background into how the deal came about
• Dan Farber wrote Atlassian, NewsGator hook into SharePoint - "By integrating with Atlassian and NewsGator Microsoft is building out SharePoint as a richer Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform."
• Richard wrote up the deal on ReadWriteWeb
• Robert Scoble blogged it - " Why do that? After all, Sharepoint has its own wiki service? Cause Atlassian's is better and Microsoft's customers were asking it to support Atlassian's." and posted a video of Jeffrey and I on PodTech

I was a happy attendee at WebDirections South 2007 and WebJam last week. Congratulations to John, Maxine, Lachlan and all involved - truly fabulous conference. The vibe was fantastic and the sessions I attended were all really high quality.

Mark Pesce's keynote to close the conference was - well - one of the most entertaining and informative presentations I've ever seen at a conference - and I go to a lot of conferences.

He talked about mob mentality, unbreakable networks, mobile telephony, free wifi and all manner of other topics - weaved together with YouTube and Robot Chicken clips. Fantastic. If you want to read the transcript, he put it on his blog but you'll want to see the podcast to get the full experience.

For those interested or those who couldn't attend, here are the slides from my presentation of Organisational Wiki Adoption (or view online):

The presentation seemed to be generally well received, with quite a few great questions afterwards and already one blog fan.

Isn't slideshare wonderful? It certainly seems to be gaining some dominance (from my totally unscientific view point) of the embedded PowerPoint/presentation-in-blog market. It's the only one I see used on any real regular basis.

FYI I set myself the challenge of doing an entire 1 hour presentation with no bullet points - and succeeded! I was even running quite a bit over time so had to run through the last few slides very fast.

Off to SF next week for two weeks if anyone is around for a drink or 5!

Everyone will tell you that I love pirates, and being Talk Like A Pirate Day I loved seeing Flickr getting into the spirit of things with a new logo today:

(Note: I also love it when Flickr greets me with G'day and informs me that now I know how to greet people in Australian - ha!)

I almost didn't notice however the new language they'd added called "Arrr!" which complete pirate themes Flickr - now that is cool.

Easy be your treasure to find mateys at Flickr - this is truly legendary work!

If you were were confused by the teaser - my apologies. I started a huge post and only got as far as the movie so turned it into a teaser.

If you haven't heard by now (and why would you?), Cutlassian was Atlassian's latest over-the-top employee event following on from last year's Mission:Atlassian.

The day was a huge success but I won't prattle on about it here because there are better locations to find information.

If you're a video person, Rob our video guru has put together a 8-minute video of the whole day, including the rocking introduction - which you can see below.

If you're a text and photos person, I suggest you read my post on the Atlassian blog which goes into a lot of detail about exactly what happened, allows you to download the clut sheets and highlights some of the funnier moments.

If you're a t-shirt person, here's the nifty Piratlas t-shirt that you missed out on by not being there :)