Who do you want to talk at Atlassian?

From the great conversation we had at the first DX Office Hours, it sounded like everyone was interested in bringing more Atlassians to more specific, nuanced conversations. To this end, we want to start organizing remote events similar to the fireside chats :camping: we’ve had at previous in-person developer events.

Which leads to the question: What are the things you want to talk about?

Confluence Cloud Macros, Forge UIKit, etc.

I think that the goal here is to land some specific topics that multiple people are interested in and that are specific enough that the conversation isn’t all over the place. We’ll loop in a few Atlassians from the relevant teams for each topic and schedule an event.

:point_down: Submit topics for conversation as individual replies to this topic and then if you see a reply you like, give it a like. We’ll use the count of :heart_decoration:s to indicate which topics are the ones folks are most interested in.

12 Likes

The future of Atlaskit: within Atlassian internally, and the extend to which app vendors and the global Atlassian Developer Community can rely on it for Atlassian app development. This should not only include feature discussion, but also ownership, reliability, stability, and ideally include decision makers outside the Atlassian Design team that can actually say something about how invested Atlassian is in ADG3 & Atlaskit.

Basically someone that can actually give an answer to Community request: can we have a no-bullshit update on the future AtlasKit? instead of just empty words.

13 Likes

Cloud EAPs: There are so many EAPs - it’s easy to lose track. How can we track (preferably in one place) what EAPs are currently going on and when they end. How does Atlassian do this internally?

10 Likes

(Stealing from @TureHoefner)

How is Atlassian using/dogfooding Connect, Forge, and their product APIs internally? Are there any plans to do more dogfooding of these types of things, so broken updates make it into prod less regularly?

16 Likes

Where is Forge UI Kit going? Of course, with the upcoming Marketplace launch, the focus mainly has been on other things than moving Forge UI Kit forward, but it doesn’t seem like there’s been a lot of improvements around UI Kit in the last months generally. Is it still being worked on? What are Atlassian’s plans for it? Is it going to be extended to be more useful (e.g. support onChange handlers, frontend validation, etc.)? Or is it at risk of having a similar career like Atlaskit?

8 Likes

You can talk at Atlassian about the small, but when things become bigger, you receive silence, opacity, arrogance, and even aggressive actions against your business.

Vendors speaking about errors in APIs, asking for new features, etc. will think the above sentence is exaggerated. But when the conversation is about THE BIG… Atlassian is not ready, sorry.

1 Like

I would also like to talk to Atlassian leadership about how they envision the role of the Atlassian Ecosystem within Atlassian, if they are aware of the challenges that Atlassian Marketplace Partners face (often caused by Atlassian) and how they are ensuring that the Atlassian Ecosystem remains a focus point within the context of your hyper growth.

Again, not looking for platitudes, but would love to talk to real decision makers to see if our struggles actually reach the right person and if not, ask them what they are going to do about it.

Because frankly, although I love talking to you @bentley and appreciate the effort from the entire DX team, in the end you can only achieve so much. Crucial cultural decisions about making the Atlassian Ecosystem part of development & operations team DNA (stakeholder management anyone?), holding teams accountable and investing in resources (both in terms of DX / Technical support, but also to get the features / API’s, bug fixes that we need) are unfortunately not your call to make.

13 Likes

Very unfortunately there is no meaningful dogfooding of Connect or Forge by Atlassian at least on Confluence Cloud to date. That’s why it breaks so often and its a cycle with why the Confluence Cloud team also won’t build features with the tools Atlassian offers. The tools Atlassian offers aren’t good enough for Atlassian to use. This is true even when vendors have implemented the same solutions Atlassian is now implementing. The solution is extremely simple, only build new features using their own public tools.

I think the direct question I’d like Atlassian to answer is: If the tools aren’t good enough for Atlassian to use, why are they good enough for other developers today?

The answer for years seems to always be “we need to improve” and “Forge will be better”, but the only meaningful answer now is “agreed, we’ll start today.” or “starting next month on the 15th all new features will be built using our own tools or we’ll improve the tools till they can be built.” or “this will never be a platform for developers”.

@JohnAgan is trying to move things in a positive direction I believe, but to date from what I’ve seen every actual implementation is moving in the opposite direction.

P2 and Server/DC were great because Atlassian dogfooded. Atlassian Cloud dev to date has been the opposite at least on Confluence Cloud.

I truely welcome contradictions to these points. But things are trending away from dogfooding the Atlassian Cloud platforms not towards it.

8 Likes

Sorry, but I’ll go with my favs again:

  1. License abuse both Cloud and Server

  2. Meaningless DC scale and performance tests paid by vendors

  3. Absolutely insane changes in core product like half baked Top Navigation, surprisingly bad designed issue view or/and upcoming unified search. Changes are just pushed to rollout without paying attention to customer/vendor feedback, and development stops right after it goes live.

2 Likes

As a first-pass on a newish format for conversations with Atlassians, we have scheduled the following Fireside Chat w/ Confluence Cloud Ecosystem at Atlassian Community Events Atlassian Developers

I’m working with the team to figure out a format that makes sense for everyone. In my thinking on what should these feel like? I keep landing on something along the lines of:

You’re at Atlas Camp and you just saw @ElaineH give a talk on Confluence Cloud Extensibility. You have a follow-up question that you didn’t get to ask so you find @ElaineH in the hallway later that day, ask the question, and @ElaineH says, “Hold on, let me grab @PeterObara, he will want to chat more on this.” And then you realize you’ve been riffing on different things with the Confluence Cloud Ecosysteam for an hour.


I’m excited to see how it goes and am all ears on when it comes to feedback. In the meantime, I’ll keep trying to line up new events.

Confluence Cloud came up in the original call that spurred this topic, so I reached out to them first. @sven.schatter keeps saying Forge and I promise we have some upcoming events that cover some of the things you’re asking about (more info landing soon!). But I’ll also see if we can’t get something on the books with them in a similar format to this. I’ll dig into AtlasKit, as well, @remie.

Who else should we grab to hang out?

1 Like

@bentley - would love to have conversations with…

  • anyone in charge for adding more UI extension points to Jira Cloud
  • the marketplace team
    – reporting & stats (I know some TPMs are able to generate some marketplace related stats for the high-level metal tiers. Some of this would be nice to simply start seeing in the marketplace dashboards for everyone)
    – license abuse
  • the design / UX team
2 Likes

@bentley, one more… someone from Atlassian Legal :slight_smile:

There are always tons of questions asking for clarifications on things like partner agreement, terms, what is allowed vs not. Given how vague certain Atlassian things are worded, my thought here would be to get answers from “from the horse’s mouth” so to speak.

1 Like

@Bentley did anything ever happen with this post?

2 Likes

Slowly but surely! I was looking at this topic through two lenses…

The first (and one that I’m selfishly into) is trying to land some sort of recurring livestream where we chat about the ecosystem with different people about different topics. This one hasn’t gone anywhere yet but it is still an itch that I’d like to get around to scratching.

The other lens was turning it into a program that we (DX) are able to organize across a bunch of Atlassian teams. My first pass at this was See Fireside Chat w/ Confluence Cloud Ecosystem at Atlassian Community Events Atlassian Developers

I have feelers out to some of the teams/groups mentioned in this thread and am working to get them scheduled for similar events (with more focus/guidance based on feedback we had from the first event). I expect to have more of these scheduled soon :crossed_fingers:.

Always open to feedback and more ideas, though!

1 Like