Over the last several weeks, we worked with two different Atlassian Communities to pilot something new: hands-on workshops aimed at introducing users to the power of developing their own apps and Power-Ups. (ICYMI, AUGs are now Atlassian Community Events/Leaders.)
Building your first Power-Up for Trello
For our first pilot event, we headed out to the Trello office in New York City where we hosted a group of Trello aficionados to get them started building their own Power-Up. The two-hour session was lead by developer advocate Bentley Cook and supported by principal engineer Matthew Cowan (who was one of the main drivers for Trello adding the concept of Power-Ups in the first place). The attendees had a good mix of backgrounds including email producers, product managers, and financial analysts from industries like education, media, hedge funds, textiles, and even comics.
The workshop started off with some basic sample code Bentley provided on Glitch.com, a free-to-use cloud tool that allows you to build and run cloud apps. There was an initial sense of concern from the group when they saw what looked like a complicated developer environment—especially when very few of them had ever touched a line of code before.
However, in the workshop we broke down each step of development, explained why and how we would be building a Power-Up, and went through the process to actually build and deploy it. The group gradually got more comfortable navigating and modifying the code, and only occasionally would raise their hand and jokingly exclaim "uhhh, I think I need an adult" if they ran into an issue.
By the end of the two-hour workshop, the entire group had successfully completed a rating Power-Up utilizing multiple scopes for board-buttons, card-buttons, list-sorters, and even some light authorization work. You can check it out below!
As the event came to a close, it was awesome to see the transformation of the group from being nervous to touch anything that looked too "technical" to actively asking questions about future Power-Ups they might want to build, where to find more documentation, and how to customize or do more cool actions in the Power-Ups they just built. (By the way, if this sounds interesting to you, head over to the Trello developer documentation to get started building your own Power-Up.)
Many thanks to Community Leaders Sam Barrow and Jill Moloney for making event this happen!
Building your first app for Jira
Our next pilot took us to Berlin, where developer advocate Peter Van de Voorde gave a three-hour workshop introducing new developers into the world of apps for Jira Cloud. Half the attendees were server app developers who wanted to get to know cloud development, and the other half were Atlassian admins who wanted to know how they could customize and extend our products to better fit their team's needs.
After getting a Cloud developer instance spun up for everyone in the room, the first thing we did was get an API-Token and use curl to call the Jira Cloud REST API. (By the way, Peter has laid out all of the steps for this in a blog post for your perusal.) After a couple of hiccups, everybody got this running, and some people were able to try different REST API endpoints they found on developer.atlassian.com.
Next up, we introduced them to the world of Connect (Atlassian's cloud development framework), assisted in large part by Ralph Whitbeck's presentation at Developer Day. After going over the differences between cloud and server development at Atlassian (and figuring out some interesting problems with npm), the group started building an example Peekaboo app for Jira (check out the code repo here).
By the end of the day, the entire workshop had their own fully functioning custom Jira Cloud app. For those who completed this quickly, we challenged them to build another cloud app by following the Jira Cloud Activity App Tutorial, and some did! Huge thanks to Community Leaders Joerg Mueller-Kindt, Hubert Kut, Khallai Taylor, and Huiyi Lin for making this event happen.
On to the next
Overall, these events brought our customers together, taught them something new, and inspired them to do more by developing with Atlassian—but our next project is figuring out how to scale this content event further. We will continue to look for ways to reach developers (or soon-to-be developers) in more parts of the globe, so stay tuned!
If you have a great idea for a future developer workshop, or content you'd like to share with Atlassian's developer community, let us know by starting a community thread or submitting an article to the developer blog.