Developer Experience Updates

Announcements
1

Hello :wave:

I’m John Agan, the new Head of Developer Experience at Atlassian. I’ve been here for just three months, and I’ve spent much of that time catching-up on community topics, meeting developers, and learning how things work at Atlassian.

While meeting developers, I found it refreshing to hear how passionate the community is and how much everyone wanted to meet, help each other, and contribute to the greater ecosystem. I also sensed a common theme of feeling disconnected after events went virtual and pre-recorded (from both sides).

A few themes I consistently heard feedback on revolved around improving our communication, documentation, and support channels. There is much to do here, but I wanted to share some of what’s in the works now:

Support
We’re staffing dedicated Developer Support Engineers to answer your questions in DEVHELP and community topics. We’re also optimizing DEVHELP to prioritize issues more efficiently, returning it to a first-class helpdesk system for developers. We’ll introduce new issue types and workflows, which will help route requests that Developer Experience can’t answer into the right hands.

Communication
We know how difficult it can be to stay informed on all the updates coming from Atlassian, and it’s top of mind for us to improve that. We’re working to centralize these updates, so you don’t have to subscribe to numerous sources to stay informed. We’re also going to work with our internal teams to improve how and when we’re communicating.

Documentation
We work hard on our documentation, but we understand that it can be difficult to find answers there. I’ve seen a few places where our documentation doesn’t reflect the resolutions provided in community threads, or an old topic is commented on and causing confusion. We’ll fix this by keeping our documentation current, treating them as the source-of-truth, and better moderating topics.

Community
We want to see and hear from you more! We’re exploring new ways to connect, such as reoccurring virtual meet-ups, reoccurring live streams, highlighting community projects, guest contributors to content, and many other ideas. We’d also love your input on how we can work closer together.

I know these items are just scratching the surface, and we’ll be working together to keeping building upon them. As a developer myself, I’m very excited to be a part of this community, and I’m looking forward to coding together.

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2

As someone who spends way too much time on here, I can’t say anything other than: I ABSOLUTELY LOVE THIS! :heart_eyes: Looking forward to seeing and hearing more from you! :smiley:

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3

This all sounds very promising! Thanks for the heads up. :+1:

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4

Hi @JohnAgan,

That is a nice start.

I think, it would be great if you could share regular updates (e.g. monthly) here about the progress on your way to improve the vendors’ experience.

Good luck!

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@JohnAgan Thanks for the update. I think your observations are spot on!

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That’s the plan!

What we had in mind is to have a monthly (or maybe twice a month in different timezones) zoom meetup. Ideally, this would be something casual where we could share updates on our side, discuss what we’re thinking about next, and get your feedback on “are we working on the right things for the community”.

It would be :sparkles: if members from the community would like to share what they are working on as well!

These are all early thoughts, but if folks are interested in video / interactive style updates, we’d be keen to start doing them in January.

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7

John’s too modest to say this—but he was also doing a similar job at Slack, Twitch, and GitHub before joining us here. I’m really pumped to have him on the team.

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Sounds very promising esp. the community approach.

For me this is the right step to push the collaboration of the entire Atlassian community to the next level.

I am looking curiously to new updates for that. Thank you John.

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9

Just don’t make that the primary source of news or engagement.

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