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rebelutionary

Mike Cannon-Brookes on J2EE, Java, software development, bug tracking, Atlassian, JIRA and whatever comes to mind.

Strategy is Something You Can LearnDecember 3 2008

Quite often when speaking I'm asked how we "came up with" Atlassian's strategy and business model.

(slide from Scaling Atlassian presentation)

For a long while, this question used to throw me. I'd answer something like "Uh... well, it just kind of evolved." or "Uhm... it was really just common sense?".

These answers of course aren't helpful to the person asking the question who is looking for some sort of learning they can build their own strategy on.

This post is my more thoughtful, updated answer.

Evolving Strategy

The simple answer of course is that we have built the strategy on a few points of initial knowledge, and then evolved it with what we learnt from customers, the market and other businesses over time.

Our initial hunches have proven to be correct. The internet has changed how software is distributed, the web has made it possible to be global from day 1, the cost of writing enterprise software has decreased.

The key point people miss is that we haven't stopped learning from other businesses in order to improve our own.

Too many people assume that your model or strategy for a startup is fixed. I believe it should be a lot more agile than that. The

A Bicycle for the MindNovember 18 2008

I'm not sure how this video got past me. I thought I was one of the biggest fans of early Steve Jobs history, yet somehow I'd never seen this video of Steve describing computers to him:

Return of the CharlieNovember 12 2008

G'day. It's been far too long. Enough said.

Sometimes life gets busy, so you forget to blog. You'll have more time tomorrow. Then you forget again. And again. Soon you're completely out of the habit of blogging. Small impulses run through your brain periodically - "Oh right, blog - I should do that. Tomorrow.". People start asking "Did you stop blogging for a reason?" or "When are you going to blog?". Tomorrow. Sadly, tomorrow rarely ever gets less busy than today.

Then something happens which jolts you out of the stupor. For me, it was the confluence of two things.

Firstly, I'm in our SF office at the moment because of AtlasCamp - our first developer camp (photos, wiki). It was last weekend, and it was brilliant. A true shot-in-the-arm, slap-in-the-face reminder of what absolutely f**king awesome people we have in the Atlassian ecosystem.

From the tweets, it wasn't just me who felt it rocked:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

A true thank you to ev

$USD 1 million, 10,000 customers and 20% timeMarch 11 2008

As always, life became busy and I stopped blogging. Apologies!

A few Atlassian, life and (Atlassian + life) updates:

• Atlassian is doing a grand experiment in engineering with our 20% time trial - watch that blog if you're a software team, it's really going to be fascinating. We're being open.
• We've passed 10,000 customers and $3m in monthly sales, our products won 4 Jolt Awards in one year, Confluence is used to power the White House and we've opened an office in Poland which we're thrilled about. Expect great things from their Pazu project. Things are busy.
• In the last month I've been to FooCamp in NZ (which was utterly fantastic - I love Kiwis, they always put on fabulous conferences and werewolf is a new, twisted passion of mine), San Francisco, Poland, Adelaide and I'm currently sitting in sunny (but dark) Brisbane. I hate hotel rooms.
• For any JIRA customers, Beyond JIRA gives you a good overview of how all our tools ti

How to write a bad resumeJanuary 7 2008

Having read a lot of resumes over the years, Jeffrey nails it in his post How to write a bad resume.

Most mortals can fit their background on one page. After about ten years of experience, you might merit a second page. Maybe. But think hard first. It might take 15 years before we need to hear it all.

I really don't understand the 3+ page resume fascination.

Charles replied with typical style from a developer's perspective:

I think what many people forget is that a résumé is an exercise in marketing. You’re trying to sell yourself to a prospective employer, but so often I get little more from a résumé than a dry list of technologies, and some useless self-assessments of the applicant’s ability.

I'll just point you to my post on Applying for a Java Job (and from the flip side if you're interested Startup Hiring) - tell me what you did in a resume!

"XYZ Corporation - Developer - Jun 2001-July2004" Thanks - very useful. What did you do? Did you make coffee for the architect and senior developers? Did you develop the