Hi All,
At work I usually do admin for Jira Software, Jira Service Management and Confluence on both Cloud and Data Centre.
I am enjoying a lot of it and reached a point where we’ve essentially gone crazy with customizations that we may be reaching more the end of it.
My manager has recommended me though that since I have some programming experience, it might be good if I learn the development side. This is useful as it means work will let me spend hours learning something even if I don’t use it (so basically even if it just pads my resume).
But I’m interested I guess in what the community thinks in terms of learning it and also what direction I should take. Do you find it useful to learn? Do companies find it interesting? Or do you find most things have an already pre-made app ready?
And should I be looking more for creating plugins (atlassian connect?), or forge?
Welcome to the Atlassian developer community @Calvin,
I’m a bit biased with 10 years of experience inside Atlassian, and even some development experience on Atlassian prior. I think it’s a good niche skill, with plenty of customer demand. For starting today, there’s no doubt in my mind that you should start with Forge. And (again biased), I think the hottest area is Forge apps to build Rovo Agents. It’s fun, easy, and AI is so hot right now. If you need something already in use at your company, my 2nd pick would be Confluence Macros.
Thanks mate for the fantastic answer. I think I’m looking for something niche too, that gives me a bit of an edge as well so thats great. My worry was customer demand and its good to hear there are some.
I also appreciate the direction, Forge certainly looks easier form searching around so I was very much hoping that would be a good direction to go, and great to hear about the Rovo agents and confluence macros. Thats definitely something I can start making changes on.
Super appreciate the answer mate, thanks!
I would say ,that Server / Data Center development in general guides you a lot of things that are fundamentally (frontend & backend) useful in other areas as well. Where as specially Forge abstracts a lot things to have a faster adoption with less power.
To give another example within AWS… If someone want to start Infrastructure-as-Code… directly with Terraform… My suggestion would be start with CloudFormaton / CDK first to understand the fundamentals instead of just an abstraction.
Thanks tied, its great to hear your view as well. We have data centre so it will be interesting to try out and see how it go’s and provides a different way to see how it comes together.