Throwback Thursday: How did you discover Atlassian #TBT

[#1]

It's Thursday!

I worked for Nýherji (later Origo) for quite some time but in different roles. Nýherji started using Jira in the summer of 2010, as a replacement for the old ticketing system, think it was AmberCat. At that time, I was a group manager of 10 or so hardware technicians. So I started using Jira to monitor the workload, create issues (work items) for them, log hours, etc.

Then in September of 2014, my role changed. I became a "project manager." It really was just a generic title. I was asked to do all kinds of things.  At that time, I was trained to become a Jira admin and Confluence admin. In another post, you can see the oldest unchanged workflow I made in that instance, which a friend at that company shared with me last year.

Soooo, how did Atlassian first enter your life? Was it through Jira, Confluence, Trello, Loom, or something else and what do you remember about that moment?

Let’s make it a great Thursday!

KGM

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

Hello @Kristján Geir Mathiesen 

That’s actually a short story. I was basically forced to use it, so I decided to master it instead. Over time, I reached a point where I could handle everything in my company myself, without needing help from an Atlassian Partner even with Migrations.

That was a couple of years ago. It definitely teaches discipline and multitasking, which helps me every day in my regular IT work as well.

[Charlene Freeman]

Hello - I was introduced to JIRA a while back while working for a major company in Atlanta as a QA Professional turned into Project Manager. I fell in love with all the capabilities and customizations. That was over 11 years ago. Now I am a site admin and an Agile Team Coach managing North American dev teams in JIRA.  Still love the capabilities, and especially what ROVO can do. 

[Stephen_Lugton]

About 2010 the company I worked for sold off the engineering R&D side of the business to focus on the consultancy side of the business.  I was meant to stay with the consulting side, but I had been managing on a project to set up production facilities for the engineering side and 18 hours before the sell off I was fast tracked to switch to the engineering side so I could finish this project.  

This meant I had to find a role beyond the production facility set up, so I was given the engineering prototyping team to set up, which included software development for test rigs for things like land mine clearance and missile tracking systems.  

When setting up this team I investigated workflow / development tracking systems including Trello and Jira; in the end we settled on file cards for the hardware prototyping as a lot of the work that the team was doing involved working in a clean room with limited space, and the technicians found it easier to work from a card rather than having to leave the clean room to go and look at a computer screen.  The software side of the team chose Trello.

In 2014 there was internal political points scoring in the parent company and someone tried to grow their 'empire' by closing down our site and moving the production facilities 40 miles away while making anyone who wouldn't move redundant.  At this time, I switched from half and half engineering / project management and moved to a company that used Jira, and I've been using Jira ever since.

As far as I'm aware they never actually closed the site down because only one person would move the 40 miles to the new site and a vice president noticed what was going on and started asking questions about the loss of technical knowledge, but by then 60% of us had left and found new jobs.

[Barbara Szczesniak]

I was introduced to Jira and Confluence at my last company. My project team used Jira for Requirements and work items, and they documented designs of new features in Confluence. This was all very helpful to me as the tech writer. The tech writing team used Jira epics and stories for our documentation projects. Mostly, I just read Jira and Confluence content and put in estimates and time worked in Jira.

At my current job, I write our product documentation in Confluence in what started as a Free instance with myself as the only user, which makes me the Confluence expert here! 😲

[Fabio Racobaldo _Catworkx_]

It was way back in 2007 and Jira was the first Atlassian tool I used to manage tasks in a client project.

[Martin Runge]

Once upon a time, a team was working on a digital signage project for a restaurant chain in Germany. Tobi, a developer, recommended a bug tracker he knew of, and we set up an instance on our Windows servers that was accessible via the internet. 

Everything led me to where I am now.

[Mikael Sandberg]

My journey with Atlassian started back in 2009 and the Dragon quest challenge. I had some time at hand and some old friends mentioned that they were heading to Summit, so I started to look into what Atlassian was doing and found the quest. Then in 2012 I started a new job and they were not happy with IBM so I was tasked to find a new test management tool, which evolved to replace a lot more and that is how they started to use Jira, Bitbucket and Jama Software.

[Kristin Lyons]

I was just out of college but had a job at a retail store.  Eventually my position was eliminated and I was given a severance package, at that time my dad had been doing contract work for the Atlassian suite and he hired me where I learned everything :) Been doing administration work with the Atlassian suite since 2014 now!

[John Funk]

My journey with Atlassian started with a consultant came into a previous company where I was working to help with a special project. I was involved with project on the fringes initially. The consultant introduced us to Jira and Kanban. That was more than 12 years ago now, and I have been using both ever since!

[Matt Doar]

I was writing my first O'Reilly book, which had a chapter about bug trackers. I'd used a few at different companies and generally found them to be pretty ho-hum. I came across Jira as part of that research and wrote a few pages in the book about it. Jira stood out for being much cheaper, easier to use, plus the source code was available. I asked Atlassian Support a few questions and got a helpful reply from MCB. It was early days in 2004.

So I brought Jira into a couple of companies after that, and then when I started a one-man tools consultancy. I kept getting calls from Atlassian pointing me to various customers in the Bay Area who wanted help. And it all just grew from there. I guess you could say I followed the money.

[Brant Schroeder]

At work.  I was looking for a better solution to our current bug tracking apps and stood up Jira to check it out.  Was able to do so much more than BugZilla and the rest is history.

[Chethan GR]

It was back in 2018 and Jira & Confluence were the first Atlassian tools I used to help a client manage their project tasks and documentation respectively.

[Trudy Claspill]

My introduction was around 2014.

I was a QA/SDET that also had responsibility for system and app administration for HP ALM/Quality Center and HP UFT. My QA position evaporated and I was told to "take my tools and go join the DevOps team" that was responsible for administering all the tools that supported product development.

Soon after we acquired a company that was already using Atlassian tools (Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Bamboo, Fisheye/Crucible, Crowd, and Hipchat), and those were rolled out to the rest of the organization and absorbed into the DevOps team.

Since there were no longer QA opportunities with my employer I decided on a career change and dove into the deep end of become an admin for all things Atlassian.

[Kristján Geir Mathiesen]

Wow, so diverse! Takk everyone for sharing. Fun to read.