Background
App Weeks bring together our ecosystem of third party app developers and our product teams. It's a mostly unstructured week to work together and learn from each other. The primary goal is to help our developers ship the apps they are working on, whether it's creating a new one or making improvements to an existing one. We host them in different cities around the world. In February we hosted one in Santa Cruz, California.
The focus for this one was Cloud for the Enterprise. We invited Marketplace vendors with key apps that are used by our large customers to come to this App Week so that they could focus on building/improving the cloud versions of those apps.
The details
App Weeks in Europe are always popular due to our large vendor presence there, but this was the most popular App Week yet. We unfortunately had to turn away about half the companies that applied to attend due to space constraints. We keep App Week capacity low (approximately 100 people) to preserve the intimacy of the event. All in all, we had 92 developers from 43 companies attend.
Hosted at the Sofitel in the Kurfürstendamm district of Berlin, this was our poshest App Week yet. The space was grand and beautiful, with lots of natural light, and the food was constant and delicious.
Monday was dedicated to presentations from Atlassians. The product teams presented their roadmaps and the opportunities for vendors to build upon. Other teams presented on best practices, such as making Jira apps scale and the Atlassian Design Principles. After learning about Atlassian's bug bounty program from the security talk, one of the developers reported a bug and got paid some money for it!
After standups in the morning, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were mostly dedicated to unstructured work time. Vendors and Atlassians gathered in breakout rooms and worked through issues side by side. The flexibility in the schedule allowed the vendors to self-organize discussion groups about how they handle things like security and cloud infrastructure.
Friday was dedicated to demos, when the vendors present what they worked on during the week. A few of them were aspirational (e.g. we learned what it's going to take to get our app to work), but many of them presented working live demos. Though it's not mandatory to demo, we had excellent participation with 35 demos in total.
Some demo highlights…
- Refined worked on bringing its long successful theming app to Confluence Cloud. They also worked on an add-on for Google Docs that allows you to publish a doc to Confluence!
- Screenful worked on a Power-Up for Trello that will show dependencies between cards. It also works between boards, and there is a counter of how many dependencies a board has.
- iDalko worked on added functionality for Exalate Jira Issue Sync that will let you sync all the info between sprints. It works at the epic level and the story level.
- Jexo worked on a feature for their app Swanly that will automatically update the release status in Jira when PRs are merged to production in Bitbucket.
The fun stuff
On Wednesday evening, Berlin-based vendor re:solution took us on a bus tour of the city, followed by a mixer at one of their WeWork spaces. We were really grateful to have them organize and sponsor such a fun and relaxing activity (with great views of the city)!
Lessons learned
At the end of each App Week we send out a survey. We're happy to report that the overall satisfaction for this event was 4.6 out of 5 stars! We're proud of that and we will continue do the things that worked well, as well as work on the things that we could improve upon according to the survey.
We don't have specifics for the next App Week available yet, but we will be sure to post here when we do, so stay tuned!
In the meantime, you can register for Atlas Camp 2019. No application required. 🙂
