I enjoyed most of the technical breakout sessions conducted by Atlassian Tech Leads, guest speakers or Experts from their Partner Community. One topic that I found really interesting was “Remote Apps Development on the Atlassian On-Demand Platform,” presented by Don Brown. This topic is very importance to us here at Zephyr as it is the future of how plugins will deploy/run onto any cloud platform without any side effects. We are currently working in this direction to get Zephyr for JIRA available on Atlassian On-Demand.

Another really good talk was by Jeff Atwood, creator of Stack Overflow. He gave a 40 minute presentation on how one can pursue their dreams and achieve goals without sucking. I thought this was a good talk because Jeff explained how we as developers need to take ownership for coding errors. If something fails in production, often times we look for excuses like the requirements were not good, or the testers skipped tests, etc etc. Instead we need to hold ourselves accountable and strive for higher levels of excellence. I hope Atlassian will have more guest speakers like Jeff in the future.

One talk that I found quite disappointing was “The Developer Experience” by Pamela Fox. Based on the abstract, I thought I was going to learn answers to these questions; how do we decide what tool to use? Is it easy to integrate with our development environment? How flexible is the API? Where do we go when something goes wrong? I was hoping to walkaway with some tips on how individual developers can help themselves create better working environments. Instead, the speaker spent her time stressing over how companies need to create better developer ecosystems.

Overall the tech topics were pretty good. One thing that I thought they could have done to improve the talks is to dive deep into the granular details and go beyond a high level overview.

In addition to listening to the presentations, I enjoyed hanging out at our booth and speaking with prospective customers. It was great to meet with existing customers and learn how our solutions are incorporated into their operational workflows. They were very candid in explaining what they liked most about our products and offering constructive criticism on what we can do to improve our solutions. We have heard the requests and will do more to provide deeper integration with more products in the Atlassian suite.

Atlassian definitely knows how to thank their sponsors. Check us out on the big screen!

What better way to end the day than getting lost in the crowd at Waterbar, San Francisco.

Who could not resist taking home one of these cool tees?