I did it for the T-shirt (Atlassian Codegeist II)
It seems that people at Atlassian are well aware of the fact that developers can’t resist themselves for working hard when there is change to get a free techie T-shirt. So also the geek in me couldn’t resist for the challenge, Atlassian Codegeist, and I just had to write plugins for JIRA, an issue management software used by many open source projects and thousands of commercial companies.
I hadn’t coded JIRA plugins before so I started from a simple Parent Issue Summary plugin that improves the usability of issue lists when organization is using issue sub-tasks. It was fun to learn how other’s have implemented APIs in their system. JIRA’s API turned out to be very developer friendly and well documented. One can always learn great deals of API development by coding plugins for different software (and of course by using the API that he/she is developing aka eat your own dog food).
After coding the first plugin it felt too easy so I had to go on. Then I learned how to code portlets for JIRA’s dashboard view. This made me code Random Issues Filter Portlet that displays random issues from a selected filter. This plugin was in the Atlassian plugin wishlist so hopefully someone will find it useful.
But I couldn’t stop there… Next in the line was Confluence Page Portlet that displays single Confluence page (just the content, not the app chrome) and an edit link. This one was fun to code as I could learn how to use XML-RPC with Java. This one also introduced me to Confluence’s API which is also very well implemented and rather easy to use. This plugin was also in the JIRA plugin wishlist so hopefully someone will also use this plugin.
Last plugin that I coded was the Agile Wall Report that generates a report from selected issues and displays the issues in three columns according to their status (not started/in progress/done). This is very familiar view used by many agile teams.
So hopefully I’ll be getting that T-shirt for the effort. There is also a community vote in progress so go on and vote for a plugins that you like (I hope you like one of mine :) ) …and wish me luck on the competition! Looking forward on developing more plugins for JIRA and other Atlassian products that we are using at work.