Well, here we are. We now have about three weeks until JiraCon! I’m super excited to be a presenter and get a chance to share with you why I’m still optimistic about an Atlassian Career. I hope to see many of you there, but that’s not the focus of today. On top of being a speaker, I will also be attending JiraCon myself! So today, I want to look at five presentations that I want to watch. I think this is a fantastic opportunity to learn from some of the best in the community, so I hope you will join me in my excitement for some of these speakers! 

To do this, I’ll be looking at each of the time slots and picking the presentation I will be looking at. So, let’s dig into this:

9:00-9:45 AM PST: Jira Dashboard & Reporting Best Practices

Morgan Folsom (Product Manager – Old Street Solutions)

One skill that I find is continually tested in my own Jira career is setting up an effective dashboard. Don’t get me wrong – I feel I am more than competent and can present data reasonably well, but I always feel like I’m bumping up against the limits of what Jira will let me do out-of-the-box. But, as I tend to preach – if you are weak on a skill, that’s where you should work on and study.  

To this end, Look to the masters. Old Street Solutions best-known product is all about reporting, and between that and the various stories and comics they’ve been publishing, they’ve very much have become the go-to experts on the topic. 

10:00-10:45 AM PST: Why I’m Sticking with Atlassian

Rodney Nissen (Atlassian Engineer, Coyote Creek Solutions & Blogger, thejiraguy.com)

Yep! This is my timeslot – so I have to be there. There is another presentation during this time I am hoping to catch on-demand, and I’ll feature that here in a moment. But I am hoping to see a full (virtual) room as I talk about why I think now is an excellent time to become an Atlassian Admin or Consultant. It will include various ways to improve your skills and career prospects and what to look forward to moving forward!

Also 10:00-10:45 AM PST: Workshop: Jira Cleanup Best Practices

Craig Wilson (Product Marketing Exec, Appfox)

This is the other presentation I spoke about previously. If this weren’t during my timeslot, this would be a slam dunk regarding my attendance. Thankfully, All the presentations will be available after the event, so I look forward to checking this one out on re-runs. 

Look, having a clean Jira instance is more important than ever – especially if you are considering a Migration to Cloud or Data Center soon. Having a clean, well-working instance means you are moving less data, making things so much easier. Adding that Craig and I have worked together on a Webinar before means I know he’s a good resource, meaning if you have to miss my session, I hope this is one you will check out! Then go back and watch my session on-demand. 😛

11:00-11:45 AM PST: Configuration Management in Jira Cloud and Data Center.

William Kennedy (Technical Director, A9 Group)

William is an outstanding figure in the community whose memes and comments I have featured multiple times on the Blog and social media.

So I wasn’t surprised to see him become a presenter! He will be talking about keeping your configurations in Jira manageable and organized – using the principles of Configuration Management. This skill is also becoming more important and is how you keep a Jira instance clean once you complete a cleanup. I’m interested in hearing what he says here and seeing if I can add any tools to my arsenal.  

12:00-12:45 PM PST: Building a Thriving Atlassian Consulting Business

Rachel Wright (Jira Consultant & Author, Strategy for Jira®)

Everyone in the Atlassian Community should know Rachel as the OG Content Creator in this Ecosystem. I count her as one of the inspirations for this Blog! I also love that her topic works well with mine – since we are both talking about how to build Atlassian careers. That was not planned, just a happy little accident. 

Rachel will be talking about going from an Atlassian Administrator to an Independent consultant and what your first steps down that road look like. While I’m not looking to go that route myself, I find it interesting and will be there watching!

1:00-1:45 PM PST: What Jira Software can do for Scientists

Robert Jacobs (Founder, Principal Tech Consultant, Buenatech)

I always love collecting new use cases for Jira. It fascinates me how reconfigurable to almost every use case the software is. So this topic caught my attention almost right away. What modifications do you have to do to make Jira useable to the Pursuit of Science? How are the projects configured and structured? Do scientists use traditional Agile or something new? I’ll be there learning everything I can, and I hope to see you there too!

2:00-2:45 PM PST: Better ways to Report Problems

Matt Doar (Staff Engineer & Jira Toolsmith, LinkedIn) 

The premise of this one is simple: Write better bugs. Personally, it annoys me to no end when someone reports a problem but fails to give me any details. For example, what page did you see it on? How easy was it to reproduce? Does it happen every time or only some of the time? What is the process to reproduce it? All of these pieces are needed if I have any hope to replicate and investigate the issue.  

Matt goes precisely into this. The premise: If you can write a good bug, you can communicate all kinds of problems to any other organization! It all comes down to making sure you are capturing the right pieces of information so things can start rolling immediately!

Have you signed up Yet?

It’s not too late to sign up for JiraCon! If you haven’t yet, go to https://jiracon.trundl.com and register! You can use the discount code TheJiraGuy15 to get 30% off your registration! I just tested this code this morning, and it appears to be live for now, but I don’t know for how long that will be the case. So get your discount while you still can!  

Though given the lineup of speakers, I’d still pay full price myself for the tickets. This is a fantastic event Trundl has put together for the Ecosystem, and I’m hoping this will become an annual tradition. So maybe next year I can see some of you at the event!

In speaking of Events

Coyote Creek will be holding a Webinar next week focused on Jira Service Management. This event will be Wednesday September 22 at 10 AM PST, and will be a virtual roundtable featuring some great people from Appfire and my colleague Don West! I work closely with Kevin, and trust me; he knows his stuff. So I will be there, and I hope you have a chance to check it out too!

Until next week!

Don’t forget you can check out all my social media links on my Linktree. There I post news, events, and anything that I find interesting. It’s also the best way to interact with me, so be sure to leave a comment and like on Social Media. You can also sign up to get new posts delivered to your inbox. Just use the signup form below! But until next time, my name is Rodney, asking, “Have you updated your Jira Issues today?”