June 10, 2021
ShipIt Days and Codegeist 2020 were two Atlassian hackathon competitions where teams competed to build powerful apps. In the spirit of these innovative competitions, Mibex decided to host its own hackathon to spur our team’s creativity and develop helpful new applications.
Here at Mibex, we took the idea of ShipIt days and extended them to a four-day “hackathon”. From Monday through Thursday, our team of seven software engineers and developers came up with three innovative ideas for new applications while our marketing manager handled the marketing of each new idea.
Our 4-Day Hackathon
We had our first kick-off meeting on Monday in which we met for two hours and presented several ideas for a few different apps. We then voted for the three best app ideas, dividing ourselves into three teams to work non-stop over the course of the next 4 days. We all put the pedal to the metal to grind out the finished product by Thursday evening, but as you can see one member of our team got very tired of hacking and had to recharge.
While we would have loved to have hosted in-office gatherings and all-day pizza binges, our ShipIt days had to take place virtually while we all worked from home. However, on the last day we all received brunch boxes packed with goodies sent to our home addresses. It was the perfect way to cap off the week, sharing our brunch boxes virtually with our team while we put the finishing touches on our three apps.
The End Result
Pull Request Checklist Buddy
The idea was to figure out a way to help teams speed up Pull Requests and make sure they’re complete. Over the course of four days, they developed the Pull Request Checklist to automate as much of the pull request process as possible. By adding the Pull Request Checklist into your protocol, you can reduce the time and habits of having incomplete pull requests and encourage your team to follow good pull request protocol.
Issue Timeline for Jira Cloud
If you have missed deadlines, unclear gaps in the development process, and no clear ideas where the most effort was put in, then our second team has the solution for you. They came up with Issue Timeline, which can help you visualise your timeline, planning, and team capacity. With a clearer idea of the past, you can better plan the future!
Analytics for Bamboo
Bamboo is surely a fantastic software in many ways, but our third team sought to make it even more functional. As many users know, a wrong agent configuration and utilization can slow down team efficiency and boost AWS costs. If you’re challenged by optimising the use of agents, then Bamboo Analytics offers you better analytics, visualization, and monitoring of your agents. Bamboo Analytics boasts several main features including an agent usage history and overall queue time. The agent usage history shows both the agent lifespan for the chosen timeframe as well as the build jobs that were executed on these agents. The overall queue time is a helpful feature that shows the sum of the queue time of all jobs for each day, giving you a clear idea of how long build jobs need to wait in the build queue before they can begin building.
Our first experience with ShipIt Days was a resounding success. We had a blast, came up with three excellent
new app ideas, and found out just how well we work as a team when the clock is ticking.
Our next round of ShipIt Days is sure to follow soon!
Interested in one of the apps? Add your requirements, vote for publishing, and link to a
MIBEX issue
today!
Happy Hacking
The Mibex team