In February, we celebrated the return of App Week – the first in-person Atlassian developer event we’ve hosted in over three years. 111 attendees from 55 Marketplace Partners came together for a week of building apps that support Cloud migrations, enterprise, Open DevOps, and Compass. Partners worked side by side with a crew of Atlassian engineers, trading advice and solving challenges.
Partners demoed a total of 31 apps and integrations by the end of the week, many of which are now available for customers to install on the Atlassian Marketplace. We’ll take a closer look at some of these projects and explore the key themes we noticed throughout the event.
Takeaways from App Week ‘23
In addition to coding time, App Week 2023 was action packed, with presentations, research sessions, demos, and roundtable discussions. Marketplace Partners also took the stage, leading several rounds of lightning talks.
Here are a few of the highlights.
1. Compass was a breakout hit
Compass is a developer experience platform that helps engineering teams manage their technical architecture. It’s a relatively new Atlassian product, and it’s extensible using Forge.
At App Week, the Compass team led a series of workshops to help Marketplace Partners get up to speed on building Compass apps, including an overview, demo, and app-building session. Team members and attendees worked side-by-side throughout the week to bring project ideas to life and address technical questions.
These workshops led to some big wins for the burgeoning Compass community, including two Codegeist winners who published their apps during the event: Enterprise Architecture Manager by Polymetis Apps and Release Notes by Move Work Forward.
And in the weeks after the event, two additional teams published their apps: Azure DevOps for Compass by Move Work Forward, and Develop with AWS by Utoolity. Even more apps are in the works, and we’re excited to see them reach customers in the coming months.
2. Partners took center stage
A major draw of App Week is the talent and knowledge of attendees, who come together to share advice and learnings. During the event, we hosted lightning talks, which allowed Marketplace Partners to present on the topics they were passionate about. The initial round was so popular that we added an extra session later in the week, giving more attendees the chance to share their perspectives. Thank you to all the speakers who volunteered!
While there were too many great talks to list here, a few memorable presentations included:
- Tobias Viehweger from yasoon, who spoke about ISO certification with Vanta. Tobias discussed how Vanta helps Yasoon with compliance certifications – something that helps him and his customers sleep better at night.
- Tobias Theobald from resolution Gmbh, who spoke about a handy tool he built for his own team’s use: a Forge playground and entrypoint finder. It shows the location of extension points in the UI and the JSON context available.
- Tobias Binna from ToolsPlus, who talked about his NX Forge monorepo build tool. It uses NX to create a repository structure that shares code across different Forge app UIs. It’s public on GitHub.
* No favoritism toward presenters named Tobias – just a funny coincidence 🙂
3. Testing new features
Several Early Access Programs (EAPs) kicked off at App Week, allowing attendees to try new Forge features. Launching these programs at an in-person event meant we could shorten the feedback loop and address issues on the spot, helping our teams improve these pre-release features.
Whether or not you attended App Week, you can now try a few of these features, too:
- Client-side UI kit: Consolidates UI kit and Custom UI functionality into a flexible, fast, and easy-to-use offering – improving performance and flexibility. Now in open EAP.
- Data residency realm migration for Connect apps: Includes a new service and associated APIs that enable you to support customer requests for app data migration. Now in open EAP.
- Multi-user app ownership: Allows multiple developers to work on a single Forge app. Request access to the EAP.
4. Working side-by-side with Atlassian engineers
Working hands-on with our Marketplace Partners is magic – there’s nothing like in-person collaboration. Problems that would take days to solve over email can be solved in minutes or hours instead.
And, the benefits go both ways. While Partners were able to accelerate their pace building critical apps for customers, Atlassian engineers and product teams gained a better understanding of how developers are using our tools and services, helping us make them better.
Friday demos marked the end of App Week, and the 30+ projects Partners brought to the podium were an encouraging indicator that the event had been time well spent. However, App Week was just the beginning. Partners continue to work on their apps in the weeks and months that follow, launching new apps and improved versions to customers everywhere.
A few Marketplace Partners who launched their projects after App Week sent in their reflections, below:
Litew8 about Project Templates for Jira, a new app workshopped at App Week:
Deviniti, who worked on Dynamic Forms for Jira at App Week:
Polymetis Apps, who updated Magic Labels for Confluence at App Week:
5. Synergy with Atlassian Presents: Unleash
This year, App Week shared a venue with Atlassian Presents: Unleash, Atlassian’s event for Agile and DevOps. This crossover meant App Week attendees had access to additional sessions with thought leaders and experts who shared tips for successful software teams.
The agenda for Unleash included exciting announcements, like Jira Product Discovery, and the news that Jira Work Management will be free for Jira customers up to 35,000 users through May 2024. Check out the recap and full list of Unleash announcements on the Atlassian Blog.
Agile and DevOps is a space where apps and integrations are an indispensable part of the toolchain. Open DevOps was a key piece of the App Week programming this year, and we featured sessions dedicated to this topic, including building into the security in Jira feature set and the integration opportunities for progressive delivery.
We can’t wait until next time
While we accomplished a lot at App Week, it wasn’t all about work. Getting to know each other, sharing experiences, and having fun were just as important. It was a fantastic reminder of the sense of community that makes the Atlassian ecosystem so special.
Want to get involved in App Week ‘24? Sign up for the Atlassian Developer newsletter and be the first to get the details. Until then, let’s keep building!
