Community Spotlight: Cindy Hoskey

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Quick disclaimer: Hi, everybody! My name is Bridget, and I'm new to the Team Atlassian as the Community Content Manager. I started the Community Spotlight series because I know that there's a story behind every Atlassian user, many of which contain nuggets of golden wisdom that will inspire you or snippets of humor that might make you smile. If you have a story to tell or would like to nominate another friend or coworker to be in the spotlight, shoot me an email to bsauer@atlassian.com. 

Cindy Hoskey wears many hats. The hat that first flagged her as a person of interest for the Community Spotlight is her title at Senior Solutions Architect role Birst. However, true to Spotlight form, Cindy's Atlassian use cases far superseded anything we could imagine. Read on about how she uses Trello to wrangle her college class and manage her ADHD.

In addition to my work for Birst, I’m also an Adjunct Professor at Farmingdale College, State University of NY. I teach the “Senior Project” class, which is a capstone class that all the students in their Computer Information Systems major have to take to graduate. They do a project that encapsulates what they have learned while pursuing their degree. My innovation to the class was to teach the students Agile (Scrum, more specifically) and this semester I started having them all use Trello, and they love it! One of them already came and told me how he suggested to his boss that they use Trello to help organize a body of work they’re coordinating with a customer of theirs. The ability to easily set it up AND make it accessible to their customer was a real winner, and he got huge points from his boss for the great suggestion. So there’s a classroom full of 20+ students using Trello to organize their Senior projects. Right now there are two groups making games, one group making a web application aimed at consumers that will be like AirBNB except for parking your car, and the fourth group is creating a web application for use by a company that recycles used IT equipment. 

So, then we come to the other use case, which is a more personal matter. I am 50 years old and quite successful in life, and yet I just found out this year that I have ADHD.  Reaching out to groups of other women and men via social media, I have found that there are a LOT of adults who are just now being diagnosed with ADHD because doctors used to believe it ended after adolescence. I personally think Trello is a brilliant tool for organizing ANYTHING, and I have been planning to put together a webinar or series of webinars to share with my new friends with ADHD about how to use Trello to get your life together.  This isn’t quite a fully baked idea yet, but I had mentioned something about it in a group a while back and a few people expressed interest.  It seems like a potentially interesting and different type of case study you could share with your readers.

Note: Keep an eye out for Cindy's follow-up article of how Birst uses Atlassian.

[Greg Hauser]

great post

[Monique vdB]

@Cindy Hoskey I was an adjunct English professor for many years -- I salute you!

[Cindy Hoskey]

@Monique vdB Thanks!  I love doing it but I am also really glad I have a "real" job, too.  It just doesn't pay enough to make it something I could do full-time.

[Monique vdB]

@Cindy Hoskey yep -- sad but true!