Development

On-demand activation of Docker containers with systemd

One of the features of systemd is its ability to defer the start-up of networked applications until their services are actually requested, a process referred to as socket activation. This isn’t really a new an idea; systemd borrowed the idea from launchd which has been in OS X since Tiger‘s release in 2005, and the venerable Unix inetd has implemented […]

Inside Atlassian: stand-ups for distributed and co-located teams

Stand-up is one of the fundamental parts of agile development, and it’s often the most misunderstood. Let’s be real: stand-ups by themselves don’t make your team agile. They aren’t about inflating egos or justifying job descriptions. They aren’t a time to plan; Sprint planning is for planning. They also aren’t the only time to mention blockers. If you’re stuck, ask for help!

Share tribal knowledge securely with Confluence Questions 2

We built Confluence Questions to help you share tribal knowledge and get answers to your questions at work. It’s helped us share broad, Atlassian-wide questions and get answers to specific questions, too. Today, we’re excited to announce Confluence Questions 2, which will help you share information within your team by making sure questions are both relevant and secure.

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Fun Fridays: 2 Valentine’s Day gift ideas

For Gilt, agile isn’t a best practice – it’s a mindset

With over 6 million members, Gilt is one of the hottest e-commerce sites on the planet. At noon every day it provides a flash sale of today’s top designer labels at up to 60% off retail. “At Gilt, every day is Black Friday,” says lead engineer Yoni Goldberg. Seconds after announcing a new sale, site traffic and transactions hurtle astronomically. Every employee and every team from development to distribution centers must be ready for the spike. It takes an agile, collaborative effort, spanning hundreds of employees from Dublin to Manhattan, to ensure a smooth and reliable customer experience.

Hipchat add-ons to brighten your day

Add-ons don’t have to be all about ease and efficiency. Some of them aim to satisfy more intangible wants, such as a yen for spontaneity and wit. It so happens that the three add-ons for Hipchat we’d like to highlight today are all about bringing creative expression into the chat room. Take a minute to explore these great—free—add-ons, and keep them on hand for any time you want to drop a dollop of levity into the conversation.

Inside Atlassian: three steps for better sprint reviews

In the late afternoon on Fridays you can often hear clapping and cheering throughout the Atlassian office. Here, we work hard, play hard, and celebrate our successes in the form of sprint reviews. Sprint reviews are not retrospectives. A sprint review is about demonstrating the hard work of the entire team: designers, developers, and the product owner. At Atlassian we like to keep our sprint reviews casual. Team members gather around a desk for informal demos and describe the work they’ve done for that iteration. It’s a time to ask questions, try new features, and give feedback. Sharing in success is an important part of building an agile team.

Realtime updates from PostgreSQL to Elasticsearch

The following is a repost of an article from my personal blog that describes how to perform event-driven updates from a PostgreSQL instance to Elasticsearch. In February I will be giving a tutorial at DeveloperWeek on development and testing with Docker, and this relies heavily on the code described in this post as an example project. So for consistency I […]

Stash on Docker

Docker has been moving at ‘lightning speed’ and has been adopted by software development teams all over the world. Since the beginning, we at Atlassian, have been very excited about the potential of Docker. In fact, we wrote early on how to run Java in a Docker container, and created an internal self-service model to deploy applications on our cloud using Docker containers. We also experimented early with containerizing our products (see our experiments on bitbucket). We have been big fans of Docker, and I am proud to serve on Docker’s Advisory Board.

Can better IT service improve software development?

With developers and IT teams working in separate systems, there are blind spots in the process. With no collaboration channel, IT teams don’t get the visibility and communication they need on fixes and improvements. Integrating service and development in one place makes critical feedback transparent, ensures uptime, increases value to the users, and improves the organization’s ability to collaborate.

Fisheye/Crucible 3.7: more powerful branch reviews

We’re proud to announce a new release of Fisheye and Crucible 3.7 today. With it, we’ve made branch reviews more powerful and automatic. This release also brings support to the latest versions of Git and Mercurial, and a variety of minor improvements and bug fixes.

Fun Fridays: how to speak Australian

Getting to know io.js

Last week, Twitter was abuzz about an initial release of io.js. io.js is an npm compatible platform originally based on Node.js and is a fork of Joyent’s Node.js. Why fork Node.js? The io.js team is made up mostly of the key contributors to Node.js. In August, the team created Node Forward which was an attempt by the community […]

IT and development working better together with Jira Service Desk

Collaboration is near and dear to our hearts here at Atlassian. Collaboration, for us, is not just about sharing documents and communication in Hipchat and Confluence, but it’s in the DNA of all our products. In Jira Service Desk, Atlassian’s IT Service Desk offering, collaboration is critical to solving IT tickets faster.