HackHouse 2014 – The grads compete in their first ShipIt

This post is part of a series on Atlassian HackHouse 2014, where graduate developers spend a week with Atlassian mentors hacking code and learning about the world of software development.

Longtime followers of Atlassian know all about ShipIt – our renowned quarterly innovation event during which employees are given 24 hours to build an add-on, an update, or a feature to an existing Atlassian product. Our 18 HackHouse 2014 grads, with guidance from four Atlassian mentors, were tasked with competing in their very first ShipIt as part of their HackHouse week.

How ShipIt works

The grads were given a brief on Thursday morning, and had 24 hours to develop a working prototype that “scratches an itch” around an area related to their personal or team operations, or demonstrates something awesome and inspiring. They were then tasked with presenting their idea and giving a live demo to Atlassian employees in the Sydney office on Friday afternoon. The grads worked tirelessly over the 24 hour period, always with support from Atlassian mentors, on their projects. Very little sleep was had, but with everyone working towards the same goal of delivering something awesome that can make a difference, the energy in the houses remained high.

The 18 grads competed in 8 different project teams. The ShipIt innovation demos included: Local saving Confluence edits, Jira images drag-and-drop, AUI Sandbox UI improvements, a touch-base issue prioritiser for Jira, external facing surveys for Confluence, Google Translate integration on Confluence pages, licence key vendor, and HTML import for Confluence.

The competition

Each team was given three minutes to present their ShipIt idea and give a live demo to the Sydney audience of Atlassians, who were blown away by the work the grads had put into their concepts and demos. The group then voted to decide on a winner, which ended up being the team who worked on local saving Confluence edits. Two of the ShipIt projects actually shipped, and are now available in the Atlassian Marketplace. The remaining projects will continue to be worked on over the next few weeks.

Want to find out what sets Atlassian’s 2014 HackHouse apart from other on-boarding programs? Visit the HackHouse app on our Facebook page.

Interested graduates or students finishing a degree in computer science, software engineering or design are encouraged to apply here for upcoming graduate and intern programs. All other candidates are encouraged to visit Atlassian’s careers page to learn more and apply for other openings. You can also follow Atlassian on Twitter and like us on Facebook.