AtlasCamp 2010

This year I'll be heading to my third AtlasCamp. It's becoming a tradition I hope never to break.

AtlasCamp is a whirlwind three days of activities targeted at developers who are customizing, writing plugins for and generally hacking Atlassian products.

There are two things that impress me most about Atlassian together with AtlasCamp:

#1 Atlassian continues to put a huge amount of effort and resources into enhancing their product platforms for developers which consist of cutting edge technologies, frameworks, APIs and tools. Sure there are challenges sometimes when things don't quite work, but for the most part they're quite simply a joy to build on.

#2 What happens at AtlasCamp does NOT stay at AtlasCamp: The last couple of years developers and Atlassians talked about quite a few initiatives. These were things that would make the lives of developers better and easier. The amazing thing is that many of these things are now reality. Here are a few examples:

• We talked about Atlassian hosting a studio of their tools for plugin developers. Now we have s.p.a.c.
• At the first AtlasCamp we talked about how it would be nice to have an SDK to help plugin developers get going. Now we have the quite excellent (IMHO) Atlassian SDK
• I'm pretty sure along the way folks griped (myself included) about the documentation. It has become possibly the best in the industry.

AND

Last year we talked about how it would have been better to have AtlasCamp attendees get to know each other ahead of time through being able to post profiles. Atlassian stepped up as usual and went one better creating a clever contest with a contest with Herculean Tasks and Points.

Atlassian is a unique company which offers a glimpse of what could be a golden age for software developers through it's innovation, strong culture and unique approach to selling enterprise software.