Wölfblag

Every quarter at Atlassian, we have “Fedex”, where all the developers take two days off to furiously code and make shiny new things (see here). One of the things being created this year involves Sharepoint, and the writeup for it was absolutely brilliant:

The Problem
Some people really love SharePoint. Especially business manager type people. They just can’t get enough of it. It’s like KPI crack. With no knowledge of programming, web design or HTML, they can go in and create customisable dashboards, reports and lists and lists of information, pulled in from every other data-store imaginable. They can set it up to email them regularly with new information, export into pretty word documents and use a myriad of other useful Microsoft-centric features. Once it’s setup, they sit back and bask in the luminescent glow of their sweet, sweet datas. From their fortress of KPI solitude, they have ample time to reflect on how brilliantly awesome they are – breaking occasionally from their meditative state to hit the refresh button.

Oh yes, they f*$&@cking love their reports.

With this image underneath it:

😀

Blargh. I had an extremely dumb day today at work. You know those days where nothing sinks in and you just don’t get anything? That was today.

Work has paid for a couple of us to take the official Sun Java training courses (at not-insignificant expense!) and I’ve been working my way through it (this is the very basic don’t-know-any-Java-or-any-object-oriented-programming-at-all one that I’m doing). At the end of each section there’s exercises where you write code to do various things. As I get further into it, they give you less and less hand-holding with the coding, which is understandable. But I was just not understanding it at all. I had to get a co-worker’s help about four times and it still didn’t actually click.

Later on, there was a support case that I took, the customer had provided a backup of his data so we could try to reproduce the problem. I was still struggling to get the backup imported when a co-worker replied to the customer having looked through it all and worked out what the problem was, and what the solution was.

Then at the end of the day I took another support case, and I’d gotten so bogged down from the two things I mentioned above that I was totally doubting myself, and had to double check my answer to the customer with a co-worker because I wasn’t sure.

Plus poor my kungfupolarbear might possibly be losing her job, or possibly not, we don’t know, because the CEO at the company she’s working at is a dick with no actual understanding of what she does.

Ugh. The title of this post says it all.

Phew! Man, this week has gone by in an absolute flash. It’s amazing how quickly time passes when you’re actively busy the entire day.

The other guy from Apple, Chris, and I are going to be supporting JIRA, Atlassian’s bug tracking software. We’ve been spending the whole week working through a bunch of documentation and learning how it all works and how to use it. We’ve been left to our own devices to work through it all, they’re not constantly looking over our shoulders seeing what we’re doing.

The general atmosphere is very similar to Apple, all laid-back. There’s no formal breaks or schedule either, which is fantastic. And we get an hour for lunch, instead of half an hour. They’ve got a kitchen area downstairs that’s totally stocked with food and drinks and snacks, all free to eat as you please! And there’s an entire large fridge dedicated to storing beer and general booze! No Bundy, but my manager said I could speak to someone about getting some in. 😀

So yeah. It’s going extremely well!

And of course, considering we now have a shiny new camera, it just wouldn’t be proper to not include some photos!