UK Ambassador - License to Geek!

Atlassian, the people behind JIRA, Confluence and other agile development tools have created an Ambassador team to engage with local technical communities around the world. I am proud to be Atlassian’s first Ambassador, focused on the UK region and based out of London.

By providing valuable technical insight and thought leadership I will be supporting a fearless team doing anything but the usual to support the technical community and get developers engaged with Atlassian. We want to show the world how successful software development can be how its the best job on the planet. We’ll tell you about stuff that is useful to you as a skilled developer, a nimble project manager, an all seeing tester or a busy CxO. No fluff, just stuff - including some cool T-shirts!

So who am I and why did I want to be an ambassador ?

I’m a certified geek and I’ve been involved in development, testing and consulting over the last two decades. Over the last few years I’ve become addicted to community involvement: running several technical communities (coding dojos and code retreats), delivering dozens of community talks and workshops on agile practices & tooling, attending events every week and speaking at conferences.

I love getting people involved in creating amazing things so I am still coming to terms with the fact that I can focus on community engagement full time, whilst getting paid to do it!

So what’s in the works…?

I was serious when I talked about getting paid to do what I love to do. So it may not come as a surprise that I’m planning on doing a lot more of what I’ve already been doing! I’ll continue to take an active role within the developer communities: running events, speaking at conferences & user groups, sharing useful technical best practices and showing off cool geeky stuff through our blogs.

Being focused on the UK means uncovering compelling stories and lessons learned from within the UK region. I’ll be reaching out to thought leaders in the community for stories, articles and tutorials based on their experiences. I’ve already received requests from UK customers interested in sharing their experiences as part of our voice of the customer and plugin of the month campaigns. If you are in the UK and are interested in sharing your technical experiences with the growing Atlassian community, let me know.

I hope to meet you all at a community event soon. To that end, the UK Atlassian User Group will change to a more community run affair (i.e. more beer). Our intent is to ensure that Atlassian User Groups allow for more frequent, highly informal, friendly meet-ups. In fact I am looking for a few customers to step up and get involved in running the show, it’s great fun and we reward you for your efforts. If you are interested, DM me or apply here. The well organised events run by our local UK partners will continue to grow and flourish, but just under a different and more accurate name e.g. Atlassian Partner Events.

I’ll also continue my activities with other technical communities in the UK, helping to generating lots of buzz around new features such as team calendars, Bonfire for agile testing and (Darth vader) Kinect wallboard community projects. I’d like to organise events such as a plugin workshop to get people involved in our codegeist competition with a chance to win some serious cash. I will also be running events for Atlassians to speak in the community and share the cool projects they are working on.

Working with the graduate developer community and several universities across London, I’ll be delivering a series of workshops on open source projects, development tools and agile practices. The aim is to help students get the most out of University and the Atlassian Classroom License Program, so they can also run there own projects with the same tools used in industry.

But this is just a start. The real question is what do you think we should be doing in the UK community?

I’m totally blown away…

This is going to be a fantastic opportunity to help uncover the passion and innovation within the local Atlassian community to help us all be successful… and have some fun in the process. I’m totally blown away by the opportunity!!!

Until the next community event, may the JIRA be with you…

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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