Real Artists Ship

So today was the second Atlassian FedEx Day ("We deliver"), and the first one I've gotten to participate in as an employee. (Here's a link to the description of the first one back in April. Presumably Mike will post the results from the second one soon.)

First thing: I had a blast. No doubt it would have been more fun had I been in Sydney with the developers and the beer, but I made do in the SF office (where I am camping out for the week). I don't know when the last time I got to code uninterrupted for 8 hours straight. It felt so great to get into that zone.

For my contribution, I decided to add a feature to Confluence that I have wanted for ages. I wanted to work on Confluence specifically because I haven't done any development for it yet: until now, I've been focusing almost entirely on JIRA.

I started at the very beginning — checking out code and getting Confluence to build for the first time on my new PowerBook. I had to dive in and start figuring out how all the pieces fit together. With a little prompting from Scott, I figured out how to add a column in the database and then I was off and running.

I have to say, though it may seem opaque to the uninitiated, I'm really impressed by the internal architecture of Confluence (and JIRA, for that matter). Adding my feature turned out to be clean and simple, so much so that I even had enough time to build a macro to display the new content.

So anyway, I had a blast yesterday. I can't wait for the next one. I really hope that with a little clean up and review from one of the official Conf devs we can get my feature ready to ship in 1.5. Fingers crossed.

As soon as Mike posts the details of what everyone built, I'll link to it.