AAA, in the US, is an acronym that stands for American Automobile Association. However, in Europe, AAA stands for Amazing App week in Amsterdam.
On November 12 – 16, 2018, We brought 97 developers/vendors and 35 Atlassians to the AtlasCamp 2013 venue in Amsterdam, The Netherlands to work on Data Center and Cloud apps.
This was our ninth week of this program (formerly called Connect Weeks). App Week is when our third-party app developers and Atlassians come together for one week and work hard developing their apps that help customers customize and extend Atlassian products for the unique needs of every team.
“The App Week proved, once again, we can really achieve outstanding results when working together with Atlassian.”
Content presentations
As is traditional with App Week, we start off the first day with targeted content that is aimed to help developers throughout the week. This time we found an easy and cheap (free) way to record the presentations and we shared them with Marketplace Vendors (Private Forum) that couldn’t attend.
The content focused on Data Center and Server App development for the first half of the day and Cloud App development the second half.
On Tuesday we ran another half day of content around GDPR, design, Atlassian Access, GraphQL (as promised at Atlas Camp), Onboarding, and Jira Performance.
On Wednesday, we had one talk on the new Jira Cloud Expression API, which turned out to be very popular with developers.
“Intense and engaging content. Great and productive atmosphere”
Breakout Sessions
Over the last couple of App Weeks, we’ve introduced scheduled 1:1 time (or Breakout sessions as we called them this time). Attendees could schedule a time with a team on a Confluence page for a 30-minute block of time on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday.
Vendors could sign up for time with 17 Atlassian teams.
Meetings took place in boardrooms in the hotel. We also may have taken over some of the tables in the hotel bar/lobby.
Vendors claimed this is some of the most valuable time in all of our events.
“My first App Week was absolutely wonderful. Everyone at Atlassian was very welcoming and having direct access to them [sped] up our plugin development.”
All work and no play?
We worked hard for a week on our apps but we also played hard as well.
On Monday we held a Happy Hour in the Amsterdam Office. Thanks to the Amsterdam Workplace Experience team for hosting us and to the Amsterdam Atlassian employees that came out to meet our vendors.
On Wednesday, we walked downtown to play some Virtual Reality and have some drinks.
Venue
Like I said before, we went back to the Koepelkerk Event Center which is part of the Renaissance Hotel in Amsterdam and was the venue for AtlasCamp 2013. It brought back good memories for some of our vendors. It’s an old venue that has a lot of character and provided a great place to hold a semi-conference and hack-a-thon. Being part of the hotel we had amazing catering provided by the hotel.
Great venue, location and food
Food was delicious
Demos
Part of the fun of App Week is seeing the demos.
We ask that vendors demo what they accomplished during the week, and if they don’t have something to demo, at least talk about what they learned during the week.
This time we had 18 vendors give 23 demos on Friday.
Next App Week
We’re close to announcing the next App Week. Make sure to check back on the Developer Blog or Atlassian Developer Twitter account to catch the announcement.