Why I Voted for Atlassian at JAX Awardsx

Going to conferences is a great way for developers to get an intensive learning experience, whether that be to discover new development languages or gain a deeper understanding existing tools and practices. A great conference for Java developers is JAX London which includes sessions on a diverse range of topics including agile practices, architectural design, JVM languages (Clojure, Scala, JRuby) and Java application development.

This year JAX London are running an award program to ask the community who they think has demonstrated the most innovation in the Java ecosystem. The JAX awards are an opportunity for the community to voice what they feel is important to them and that feedback will help JAX provide sessions that the community values the most.

Atlassian have been nominated in the category of “Most innovative Java company” and I took an opportunity to vote for them because I have been amazed at the work they have done in the Java space.

Atlassian have long supported open source software and many notable projects (spring, maven, hibernate, etc.) have benefited from the free access to JIRA, Confluence and Atlassian developer tools (Bamboo, fisheye, crucible, clover, etc.). This support for open source projects has helped turn the Java ecosystem into a powerful and diverse platform for development and one of the main reason developers become attached to Java.

Atlassian have been helping lead the way in Agile development with the likes of Greenhopper agile planning tool, with support for custom kanban boards. Couple this with some great dashboards and information radiators, Atlassian have provided some great tools to visualise the important events in many complex projects.

Atlassian are now looking to the future and using devices like the Microsoft Kinect to enable you to drive your agile planning and daily standups using an electronic wallboard whilst still giving you the important psychological interaction with your cards you get with a physical board.

Atlassian also support distributed version control (DVCS) in their developer tools to help foster innovation within project teams and across the enterprise. Having a set of tools that support the creativity of developers and allow them to share code easily provides more opportunity for innovation.

Recent updates to Fisheye provide developers with a visual guide to their complete code history and makes understanding which branches to merge a trival task. Add to that the work that has gone into making Bitbucket the number one resource for private repositories and you have a highly flexible code management system that does not require an army of devops to manage it.

I have seen first hand that innovation is a core part of the way people think at Atlassian, with FedEx days and 20% time encouraging everyone to use their brains for something that is important to them. Some of the most interesting plugins and features have come from these kinds of projects.

I hope you will consider your vote carefully and see the value in voting for Atlassian as I feel the company is just such a great role model for how an effective business can be run whilst providing an innovative and exciting experience for employees, partners and customers.

As well as Atlassian, I voted for Clojure and the London Java Community. Again, two great examples of innovation happening in the Java world and I feel are worth your consideration.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

---

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 ShareAlike License, including custom images & stylesheets. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at @jr0cket