Happy Wednesday, Jira Guys and Gals! If I have my scheduling right (and accounting for the timezone shenanigans), I should be sitting down for the first Keynote of the day. But, before that, let us take the opportunity to recap my first day and a half of Team ’23. It doesn’t feel like it’s been that short, but it has! So, let’s dig into it.

First: We are talking about Data Center.

So, Atlassian is listening – Data Center isn’t being hidden this year. At the time of writing, I am still waiting to confirm if Data Center will make it into the keynotes. A very skeptical part of me wants to say it won’t. But, out on the Expo floor, it appears in the Atlassian village twice – once as a part of Atlassian Enterprise and once as a migration target from Server. Both were manned by people I spoke with, and both went out of their way to assure me that Data Center isn’t going away for “a while.” No one wanted to define a while and seemed to try to avoid that question, but compared to the radio silence last year, it’s a definite improvement. 

I also spoke with a cloud migration specialist from Atlassian for a while, and he agreed that for some organizations, Cloud is not the best solution for them – which is the first time I’ve heard that from Atlassian in a long, long while. I’m also scheduled to speak with my day job team with Atlassian later today, and Atlassian’s DC Product Lead is inviting me to meet with her at the Data Center booth. So I hope to have some more concrete news in tomorrow’s post! But I’m already much happier!

Team ’23, Day 0

This year is my first time attending a Team event live as a community leader, and I’m blown away by the experience here! I arrived at my hotel and got checked in, and almost immediately, it was time for the Community Leader’s reception. Well, I got lost – badly – but managed to find the Pulse Reception that was going on at the same time. Pulse is Atlassian’s rebranding of the TAM Day event, and the rest of my team was scheduled to attend, but I needed to be elsewhere. As I was leaving to find my way to the reception I was supposed to be at, I was stopped by an Atlassian who recognized me, and we spoke at length about some of the struggles we have with DC.  

After I (finally) found my way to the correct place, I met so many people I’ve only talked to online, including a good number of #AtlassianCreators. I don’t know if I’ve spoken about it in a post (hmm…post idea!). Atlassian is attempting to start an Influencer program, and you may have seen me share Content on LinkedIn or Twitter from others using the #AtlassianCreator tag. The program is still in Beta and is only available to community leaders at the moment, but I love the support I’ve been getting from Atlassian and can’t wait to see how this program evolves.

I also had a few moments of “Oh wait…You’re THAT Jira Guy! I read your posts!” I’ll never get tired of how that moment feels.

And that pretty much wrapped up my day 0, and only after getting lost another couple of times I finally made my way back to the hotel.

Team ’23, Day 1

My proper day 1 started Tuesday morning, where after I got my badge, I was treated to a joint breakfast with Atlassian Partners and other Community Leaders. John Funk and I spent most of the breakfast talking about what those from Huntsville, Al (hometown Pride!) always talk about: we swapped tornado stories. What? It’s storm season, and every Huntsvillian has a tornado story!

I then made my way to the Community Leader workshop. The first thing to report, Atlassian is looking to align its University and Community programs more closely. This change makes sense, as both center around learning; the only difference is whether it’s Formal vs. Informal learning. We can already see that this year, as the Community and University are sharing a booth on the Expo floor. Second, Atlassian realizes they have yet to support us Content Creators in the community and are working to change that. As I noted above, we already see the start of these programs, but Atlassian is starting to ask what more they can do to help us.  

We then got a preview for a talk that Atlassian’s Mark Cruth will be taking on the road later this year about intentional team Shaping – helping shape how your team works to help it more naturally align on a target. I am debating on taking several of the exercises back to my team, so if you can see this talk later this year, absolutely take the opportunity to see it.

After a break for Lunch, We got a preview of a tool that I can’t quite talk about yet, but I love how it could work towards not only helping me create better Content for you but how it will help you in learning best practices to apply to your Atlassian instances. At one point, I asked, “I know I can’t share details of [X] yet, but could I use this to create screenshots for examples in user guides?” The answer was yes, I can, but that is also such a “The Jira Guy” question to ask. What? Do you know how much work it takes to make a good example look realistic!?

We finished the Community Workshop with a live recording of Atlassian’s Work Check. I don’t want to spoil their topic until they release it, but I have OPINIONS.  

After that, I hit the Expo hall. I had two goals while there – form partnerships with as many Atlassian partners as possible, and learn about stuff I could write about later. A side quest was a challenge from Quiz Wiz Quizmaster Sajit – judge the “Best Swag” of the conference. (I’ll be wearing the Trundl glasses today, Sajit!)

I also sat in the front row for James Cameron’s keynote talk. Hearing him talk about how Arnold Schwarzenegger became the Terminator was both funny and enlightening – especially considering I grew up with him in that role and have a hard time imagining anyone else who could have fit it. He also had some interesting insights on building a team culture fast and how some of a team’s best moments look like their worst moments at the time. If you get a chance to hear him talk  

So that brings us to today. I am writing this right before I get ready for Team ’23 Day 2, and this is where I expect the rubber to meet the road. Today’s keynotes should be the feature updates and new things I love to recap, so I will be there to take notes and prepare for tonight’s mad writing session. But, while I’m here, I also want to be your eyes and ears – especially if you aren’t here. So please send me questions via my social media pages (which can be found on Linktree). Twitter and LinkedIn are your best chances to get a faster response! I’ll ask Atlassian and vendors to get your answers and share them in a post later this week.  

That reminds me. You can meet me today (April 19) at 10:45 AM at booth 34, where I’ll hang out with the Old Street Solutions people. Stop by, say hi, get your TJG laptop stickers, and check out what Custom Charts can do for your Jira reporting!

But until tonight, this is Rodney, asking, “Have you updated your Jira issues today?”