Jfokus is the biggest Java conference in Sweden and runs for three days from 13-15 February. There will be a bunch of updates about software development trends; some highlights include:

• Kevlin Henney - Cool Code
  Kevlin will show how to fit the code of a chess program into just 4.8 SMS and how to write a web server in just one line of code. The point is, that programmers should start studying code by reading more of it. There is so much free and cool code out there.
• David Chandler - Dart Language and Modern Web Apps
  David will take a look at the frameworks and HTML5 features that are driving innovations and introduce Dart, a new language for structured Web programming
• Neal Ford - The Curious Clojureist
  Neal is telling you why you should learn Clojure and why it is the coolest new language on the JVM. Don’t agree? See for yourself and join Neal’s session.
• Angelika Langer - Lambdas in Java 8
  Java 8 will introduce elements of functional programming into the Java programming language – so called “lambda expression.” Angelika will explain the purpose of these new features.

The Atlassian Bar at Jfokus

What better way to end a whole day of talks than with some free beer at the famous Atlassian Bar.

Join us on Tuesday night between 6pm and 8pm for a free drink. Listen to some live Jazz music, get some food at the Jfokus buffet and mingle with all the software nerds at the conference. We will also bring some free Angry Nerds Shirts with us. Don’t be an angry nerd if you don’t get one, just have another beer and talk to us about the latest trends in software development, the new cool editor in Confluence, the upcoming JIRA 5 release or the awesome Rapid Board for Scrum and Kanban teams in GreenHopper.

Hear about our development culture first hand

 I will be delivering a talk at Jfokus too. My talk, titled “How to make good teams great,” is on Wednesday, 15th February 9am. If you want to hear about about Atlassian’s FedEx Days, 20 percent time and Dogfooding come along! Additionally you could read my German blog series about team motivation, which is also covering these topics.

 

 

Not registered yet? Register for Jfokus

Registration for Atlassian Summit 2012 — which takes place May 30-June 1 in San Francisco — will be announced soon, but in the meantime, you can submit a speaking abstract in our call-for-speakers. We’re looking for talks across a wide variety of topics and areas. Below, I’ve outlined some of the types of topics and case studies we’d like to see represented at Summit 2012.

The art of the team

The theme of this year’s event is Art of the Team and talks should be geared towards showing attendees how to squeeze the most value out of the Atlassian products for helping teams deliver great results. Topic suggestions include:

• How your team was able to expand the scope of operations by increasing product adoption, performance tuning, or expanding beyond expectations
• Using the products in different functional areas such as dev ops, IT, engineering, tech writing, QA, support, or even by non-technical teams
• Greater than the sum of their parts: how the Atlassian products are used together to improve collaboration, release management, or development environments
• Atlassian in an agile environment — from project management to release engineering and all things before and after, like story creation and tech writing
• Customizations, integrations and plugins used to take the Atlassian products beyond their original functionality into new areas

SAN FRANCISCO & SYDNEY–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Atlassian, the leading provider of collaboration software for software development teams, kicks off the first of its 2012 Summer Intern programs this week by hosting ten Australian graduate students for a week of coding and surfing at the company’s Hack House, a beach house near the company’s Sydney-based headquarters. Several Atlassian developers will mentor the graduates, who will be tasked with developing a new product feature ready for shipment by week’s end. The ten graduates were selected from more than 400 candidates from among Australia’s leading universities.

Atlassian is also announcing that it is now accepting applications for its 10-week U.S. Summer 2012 Developer Intern program. Interested university students with computer science or user experience majors can apply by submitting a resume and cover letter at the company’s website. Atlassian will select up to six students who will split their time between the Sydney office and the Hack House, and the company’s new San Francisco office. The summer developer interns will take a new product from concept to launch.

“With our intern programs, we want to create an environment that fosters innovation among bright university students who are passionate about programming,” said Joris Luijke, vice president of talent for Atlassian. “We’ve never underestimated the correlation between the number of nights spent on a couch programming and the quality of engineering breakthroughs. It’s at the heart of Atlassian’s innovation.”

“In a short period of time, the new housemates are responsible for creating and shipping a mind-blowing plug-in or feature and demo-ing their solutions to the whole company,” added Luijke. “Yes, the pressure is on, but the graduate interns will be mentored by some of the brightest people in their field — even our founders will get involved.”

Atlassian Founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar finished university and launched the company in 2002. They envisioned a new kind of enterprise software company that leveraged the Internet to offer high quality, low-cost products for software developers around the globe. Today, Atlassian has become one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies. More than 17,000 companies use Atlassian’s collaboration and software development products.

“We are constantly looking for enthusiastic, imaginative people who share our mission to create awesome products that help make the lives of innovators better,” said Julie Rogers, Atlassian’s director of human resources, who is spearheading the U.S. Summer Intern program. “We definitely like to work hard, but we also believe in having fun and taking advantage of our beautiful office locations. We’ve got lots in store for our interns — summer 2012 will be a summer to remember.”

U.S. 2012 “Summer to Remember” Developer Intern Program

Atlassian’s U.S. Summer 2012 Developer Intern program will begin in June. Selected students will spend their first four weeks working in the Sydney office and the Hack House followed by six weeks in the company’s San Francisco office. The interns – mentored by some of the company’s top talent in product management, design, development and marketing — will be challenged to push a new product or a major software product plug-in through its lifecycle. They will also experience Atlassian’s unique culture of ping pong tournaments, dogs in the office, FedEx Days and philanthropic efforts.

Sydney-based Graduate “Hack House” Program Accepting Applications

Interested graduates or students finishing up their computer science or software engineering degrees can apply here for upcoming 2012 Hack House Graduate Intern programs.

“At Atlassian, we trust that our graduates and interns alike have the potential to build amazing things,” said Jade Li, Atlassian’s talent advisor and graduate coordinator. “We invest in providing them with the environments and support needed to make a real impact in the software development industry.”

Additional resources

• Follow our Hack House daily events by tuning into our blog for regular updates at http://blogs.atlassian.com/
• Find out what it takes to be a Graduate at Atlassian and apply for an opening at http://www.atlassian.com/company/careers/graduates
• Visit our website to learn more about our Summer 2012 Developer Intern program at http://www.atlassian.com/company/careers/interns
• Watch us on YouTube: www.youtube.com/goAtlassian or AtlassianTV: http://www.atlassian.com/tv
• Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Atlassian
• Become a fan on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/atlassian#!/AtlassianSoftware

About Atlassian

Atlassian products help innovators everywhere plan, build and launch great software. More than 17,000 large and small organizations – including Citigroup, eBay, Netflix and Nike – use Atlassian’s issue tracking, collaboration and software-development products to work smarter and deliver quality results on time. Learn more at http://atlassian.com.

Contacts

Atlassian
Annelise Reynolds, 415-701-1110

This is a guest blog post by Gareth Wilson from Adaptavist who are an Atlassian Platinum Expert. Adaptavist provide services and best practice that help ensure customers’ success with JIRA, Confluence, GreenHopper and Dev Tools.

Games Development Problems

Source: A survey of problems in Game Development, F. Trindade

At Adaptavist we’ve worked alongside a number of games development companies who use Atlassian software to assist with their development processes. Having gained a good understanding of the issues they had prior to using Atlassian software, we weren’t surprised when we saw a review of game development post-mortems that revealed the problems most commonly experienced when creating video games.

Managing Your Project

Working out a project’s scope and getting the story and features of a game just right is a difficult enough task as is. But looking in to the cause of some of these problems showed that scope could become overly ambitious or unrealistic when a tight deadline was introduced or when additional features were added to the project as it progressed. Deadlines often have to be moved up or features added because of commercial pressures such as the release of a competing game or a desire to be the first to market. However, we know that delays often aren’t possible due to commitments with publishers and a need to release prior to key sales periods. This results in either requirements for features get cut, or a need to work over time to meet the deadlines. This isn’t helped by design problems, when content is supplied late.

What underpins these issues is the importance of project tracking and management. Improving estimates to include new features, providing team members and management with a better understanding of the impact of project changes and enabling stakeholders to visualise project progress show what’s possible within a given time frame. Atlassian’s JIRA can help you achieve this as a project tracking tool that includes custom workflows, dashboards connecting your team with their work and feeds and notifications that provide updates on activity. This is especially powerful when combined with GreenHopper, which adds agile planning and visualisation to facilitate incremental improvement for game development teams.

Zynga, for example, use JIRA and GreenHopper amongst other Atlassian tools, not only to assist their development processes, but company-wide in some way.

Communicating Effectively

Testing and Fixing Bugs

Tackling These Problems Using Atlassian Tools and Best Practices

Atlassian products are a great choice for games development, whether you are shipping the next big thing or just want to improve your development processes and stay on budget. Over 150 of the world’s most successful game development companies rely on JIRA, Confluence and Atlassian Dev Tools to manage their project, bugs and development. But regardless of the products you use, to maximise the benefits gained you need to understand how to use, plan, and configure them properly. Adaptavist have worked with hundreds of deployments, with many organisations in the games industry and beyond. Whether you’re just planning to deploy Atlassian products, or have been using them for some time, we have services and knowledge of the best practices that can help ensure your success with Atlassian products.

Beginning Monday, January 30th, Atlassian is sending 10 Australian graduates to “Hack House,” a beach house in Narrabeen near our Sydney headquarters, for a week of training, coding, and team building events. Oh, and don’t forget the surfing — we’ve already told our grads to pack their sunnies and tanning oil to help them withstand the hot Australian summer sun while they dream up their next innovation. The “Gradlassians,” as we’ve dubbed our team of 10, will be tasked with developing a new product feature ready for shipment by week’s end. Several of Atlassian’s top developers will also be staying at the Hack House to mentor our budding geniuses and lead their week of trainings.

“I’ve joined Atlassian because I believe that they help people with their products and make the development of software better for a large number of people,” explains Robert Massaioli, one of the Gradlassians. “I think that any useful additions that I make while working at Atlassian can help a large number of people. I like helping my fellow developers.” Adds Joshua Ali, another Gradlassian: “I, too, share a passion for software design and development, and enjoy my time at work (so much so that it doesn’t seem like ‘work’ at all!).” So what better way to blend fun and hard work together than by holding our Gradlassian hacker boot camp at a beach house?

The 10 Gradlassians, who were selected from a stellar candidate pool of more than 430 graduates, represent some of Australia’s finest talent. Each will bring a different dev specialty to the table, from online gaming to fitness apps to political research. We can only imagine what coding madness will arise when we put all 10 of these highly skilled graduates with unique backgrounds and personalities in a beach house together for five days. You can follow their progress here throughout the week.

If you’re a recent grad in the US and the Hack House sounds good to you, apply for the Atlassian grad program. If you’re still in school in the US, check out our internship program in our San Francisco office.

Tickets will sell out fast so reserve your spot today and we promise to provide you with the best in Atlassian updates, news and social events. We’ll be bringing engineers and product experts from around the globe.

When and where

Monday 12 March – London

Thursday 15 March – Paris

Tuesday 20 March – Frankfurt

Please note, the events in Paris and Frankfurt may have some sessions in French and German, respectively.

Call for Speakers

Got a great story to tell? We have a few slots at each event for customers who want to share their case study. Please submit your presentation ideas.

Get Your Geek On

Passionate about building plugins? We’ll conclude Unite with a 2-day developer event in Wiesbaden, Germany. That’s right, AtlasCamp, is coming to Europe! More info and registration here.

Looking forward to seeing you across the pond!

Beware of Atlassians wielding long-handled loppers.

It’s a little known fact that Atlassians have green blood. You could cut one to see, but that’s probably not a good idea. Especially if the Atlassian concerned is holding our weapon of choice, the long-handled lopper.

A few days ago, a group of us went out to help Conservation Volunteers Australia save the planet. Our mission: To rid (a small part of) Lane Cove National Park of the noxious weed, privet.

Privet, like many other non-native plants, simples loves Australia. It’s taking over and destroying the indigenous plants. Eventually, our wildlife will lose the habitat it depends on for food and shelter. Dwindling bio diversity. Global warming.  Planet under pressure.

Conservation volunteers to the rescue!

Our mission for the day

Conservation Volunteers Australia works hand in hand with the Australian national parks authorities. Three park rangers from Lane Cove National Park were at the conservation site, to show us the ropes.  Before we set off into the wild wild bush, one of the rangers clued us up on how to get rid of privet.

Trim away the branches, lop the stem at the base, then paint the stump with poison within 20 seconds. Throw the branches behind you and move on. (This led to a bit of confusion and hilarity when some of us realised we had cut off our line of retreat. But that was all part of the adventure.) Ignore any weeds that are shorter than knee-high. Try not to cut down a native plant.

Once the entire area has been cleared, by us and other volunteer groups in coming weeks, the rangers will light a controlled fire – a “hazard reduction burn”. This will burn all the cut branches and the small shooting weeds. The native vegetation will burn too, but will seed and sprout new growth. Many native plants rely on a good fire every now and then to clear the ground for the next generation and to trigger the release of seeds and the sprouting of seedlings.

Lions and tigers and snakes, oh my

We encountered this water dragon, a lizard about one metre long, sunning itself on a log.

The ranger’s briefing included an exciting list of hazards. Snakes are common in the park, in particular the brown snake and the red-bellied black snake. “But”, said our guide, “once we start working, any self-respecting snake will clear out. They don’t look at something 6 feet tall and say, ‘Ah, food.’”

We were warned to be wary of bull ants and jumper ants. They are aggressive, especially if you disturb a nest. They actually hop, and they move fast. We did spot a nest, and gave it a wide berth.

Ticks abound. We all sprayed ourselves liberally with insect repellent, but still a couple of people found ticks on their clothing. Usually a tick bite is just itchy and a nuisance, but some people do run into trouble with infections.

In truth, our park ranger said, our biggest foes were back pain and “that big yellow thing in the sky”. The weather was beautiful: not too hot, a light breeze, no rain. Nevertheless, we did spend the best part of a day in the Ozzie bush in mid summer. And we kept demolishing the trees that were giving us shade. So we drank lots of water, took frequent breaks, and learned to bend our knees rather than our backs.

Victory!

Overheard

Armed with notebook and pen, I jotted down some comments from the bush whackers:

• “Finally, we see the world in more than 1920 pixels.”
• “I’ve discovered muscles I didn’t know I had.”
• “That’s a greenhopper, right?”
  “No, a grasshopper.”
  “What’s a greenhopper then? Oh, wait, that’s our product!”
  [Yes, this is a true snippet of conversation, and the confusion was genuine. Real-life marketing. ]

A nature walk

After lunch we took a short walk through the park and learned a lot about the plants, wildlife and nature care groups in the area. Atlassians have taken part in three bush regeneration days so far, and the walk has become a tradition. Quite apart from saving the planet on a regular basis, we love to learn something new. Even if it’s just that “cutting down trees is harder than writing code” (OH).

More pictures

See the people and the action in this Flickr set, and check out Conservation Volunteers Australia on Facebook.

8 Releases in 6 Months

A new Team Calendars release, 30 days or less…guaranteed. You wouldn’t think that the Team Calendars development team and pizza delivery have much in common, but with such a reliable delivery schedule, we’re putting new features in your hands almost as quickly as pizza. We’re stoked that we’ve been able to continually give you more more value by delivering the features you’ve been asking for.

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With the start of a new year almost here, I thought it was fitting to countdown down the top 11 features we added to Team Calendars in twenty eleven.

# 11 – Prevent and Recover Accidental Deletions

You track important events in your Team Calendars so we want to make sure they’re safe. So in Team Calendars 1.1 we added delete confirmations.

What about when some idiot deletes an entire calendar by accident? Yes, we’ve all done that before Whenever you delete an entire calendar, Confluence emails a backup file to anyone subscribed to that calendar. You can later use this file to restore the calendar if necessary.

# 10 – Notifications for Calendars You Care About

Just like Confluence Pages and Blogs, we made it possible to Watch the People and Event calendars that are most important to you – like your team’s leave calendar, and support roster.

Team Calendars will send email notifications whenever a new event is created or an existing event is edited in the calendars you are watching. If you’re tracking your team’s leave with People calendars, you’ll always know why a colleague is not in the office.

# 9 – Connect with People

Next time a new face pops up in one of your People Calendars you’ll it find easier to learn more about and connect with them.

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# 8 – New User? No Sweat.

We want to make sure new users get the most of of using Team Calendars, so when a new calendar is created we let users know about all the cool things they can do.

# 7 – Team Calendars Goes Global

Have you or your users changed the default language in Confluence to German or French? No problem, Team Calendars can handle that!

# 6 – Dates That Make Sense, No Matter Where You Live

In Team Calendars 1.1 we added support for additional languages. In Team Calendars 1.2 we made some changes to take advantage of user’s language settings.

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# 5 – Smarter Email Notifications

In addition to making it easier to watch calendars, we also made the email notifications themselves more useful.

When watching a page with an embedded calendar, you’ll receive notifications on changes to the embedded calendar.

Email notifications for new and changed events also make it clear why you are receiving the notification.

# 4 – Keep Calendars Secret with View Restrictions

Just like to Page Restrictions in Confluence, we let you define view restrictions for Team Calendars for Confluence groups and individual users.

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Perfect for planning that awesome holiday party, and keeping it a secret

# 3 – Get Complete Control with Edit Restrictions

You loved the added security of managing the view restrictions in Team Calendars 1.3, so in 1.4 we let you manage a calendar’s edit restrictions giving you complete control over who can and can’t see your calendar, and exactly who can edit and contribute to your calendar too.

# 2 – Improve Visibility of Projects

Since more than half of our JIRA customers also use Confluence, the Team Calendars development team worked hard to tighten the integration between the two. Thanks to Team Calendars 1.7, if you have custom date fields for your JIRA Projects – ‘QA Due Date’, ‘Scheduled Deployment Date’, etc – you can now map them on a JIRA Calendar inside of Confluence.

When you combine your JIRA Calendars with your People Calendars in a single consolidated view, you’ve got a great solution for communicating when changes are going to happen and identify if you’ve got any resourcing constraints that might impact your ability to make scheduled changes.

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# 1 – Better Manage Team Leave

Creating a People Calendar helps you to plan and track your team rosters, leave, and travel plans. In Team Calendars 1.7 we took planning leave one step further by enabling you to add multiple people to a single People Calendar event.

If you always have multiple people traveling to an event, such as a conference, this improvement should make your life easier and take the hassle out of tracking the leave of your teammates around the holidays.

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More to Come in 2012

Don’t worry, we won’t slow down in 2012. Team Calendars 1.8 is in the works with better support for private calendar URL’s and one-click Google Calendar integration. Stay tuned!

Thanks for your support and constant feedback about how we can make Team Calendars for Confluence a better solution for you and your teams. Happy New Year from everyone involved with Team Calendars at Atlassian!

2011 was an epic year for the JIRA Family including two massive releases, the launch of a new product – Atlassian Bonfire – and the introduction of Atlassian OnDemand just to name a few things. It’s been really tough to whittle this list down to just 11 things, but I’ll do my best to use a traditional 4-4-2 formation (see primer on jersey number relevance) to highlight my “JIRA Best XI” for 2011.

The Keeper

For anyone who has played the game, you’ll know that goalkeepers are a special breed and sometimes a bit looney – no offense to Michael Knighten or any other ‘keeps out there.

Keepers are typically the older veteran who is wildly popular with both the team and the fans, and for our team this is no exception:

No. 1 – User Timezones

JRA-9 was not only the oldest, but also the most voted feature (454 votes), we added to JIRA in 2011. And we didn’t just add timezones support, we took timezones to the next level by making it clear for distributed teams to see when other teammates are either sleeping or on the job.

The Defense

A solid foundation is the key for any winning team, so it was important for the JIRA team to bolster the back line and build a platform for success:

No. 3 – New Installers / Upgraders

At the heart of the back four we have the new installers for Windows and Linux. Not only did we add simple way for administrators to setup and configure JIRA, we inculded an unattended installer and automated upgrader for pain-free JIRA deployments going forward. On top of that, we even provided a self-updating plugin manager, database config tools and enhanced importers.

No. 5 – Application Links

The other anchor in defense, Application Links are the glue holding all your Atlassian tools together providing aggregated activity streams and key integration capabilities.

For example, connecting JIRA to Confluence allows quick issue creation and linking of JIRA issues from Confluence. In fact, with the recent release of Confluence 4.1 JIRA issue links will instantly autoconvert in the Confluence editor:

No. 2 – Admin Overhaul

In addition to adding LDAP & Active Directory support, centralized user management, and a new visual workflow designer; we revamped the JIRA Administration interface to make it easier than ever to manager your instance. A new project-centric administration screen makes it simple to see how each project is setup, so you can make changes quickly.

No. 4 – JIRA on the Bookshelves

Four new books hit the shelves this year providing an excellent array of resources for JIRA admins and plugin developers:

The Midfield

As the engine room of the team, the midfield is where the heavy lifting happens. We added a number of key features and enhancements to make JIRA even more powerful than ever.

No. 6 – Visual Workflow Designer

JIRA’s versatility is rooted in it’s powerful workflow. That’s why I was personally very excited to see the acquisition and integration of the Visual Workflow Designer making it easier than every to create and modify workflows on the fly:

No. 7 – Activity Streams

No one can quite “bend it like Beckham”, but JIRA Activity Streams are incredibly flexible and configurable.

Each team member can dial in their personal activity streams to keep tabs on the specific systems, people and activities that are important to them. They can also vote, watch and comment directly from their dashboard, or drop custom streams into their favorite RSS reader.

No. 8 – JQL Search Change History

JIRA Query Language set the gold standard for advance search within issue trackers. In 2011, JQL blossomed into the prototypical “two-way player” by adding historical search capabilities. Use the “WAS” operator on everything from status to assignee and uncover changes made “BY” certain people anytime in the past. Great for building killer dashboards, ad hoc reporting or just sleuthing around JIRA.

No. 10 –  Issue Creators

The spark at the center of midfield is the “creator” who gets it all going. JIRA has no shortage of ways to create issues – the web, your browser, your IDE, email, remote APIs, applications likeConfluence, and more. In 2011, we introduced JIRA Mobile Connect for collecting user feedback and crash reports from your mobile apps and the JIRA Issue Collector for creating issues from your website:

And just wait, 2012 promises even more!

The Forwards

Leading the attack, the forward line is always part of the action and usually the ones making the real difference. In our team, the strikers come from our popular add-ons, GreenHopper and Bonfire:

No. 11 – Rapid Board

After spending a few months in the “GreenHopper Labs”, we finally unveiled the Rapid Board. Based completely on JQL, Rapid Views introduce a new way for agile teams to view issues in JIRA and work through their daily tasks.

No. 9 – Session-Based Testing

Atlassian Bonfire is the newest member of the team and is already blazing a trail for exploratory testing. We all rely heavily on automated testing, but with the growing emphasis on usability and user experience, many software teams are spending more time manually testing applications.

Bonfire’s session-based testing evolved out of our own need for better tool for managing our agile testing efforts.

Off the bench

Every strong team needs the support of a deep bench, and ours knows no limits:

No. 12 – The JIRA Ecosystem

This year the JIRA ecosystem exploded, bringing the list of JIRA add-ons – plugins, applications and integrations – to over 400!