Connect Week 2016 San Diego: Retrospective

After a full week of hacking away in San Diego, we are finally back. We have settled in and reflected on the experience. We are now ready and eager to keep up the energy and work on the valuable feedback and realizations we had during the event.

We want to share our thoughts, conclusions and feedback of the event.

During the week we had the opportunity to take part of work sessions and also some informative sessions that were organized by Atlassian’s team. We also had the opportunity to meet other development teams, there were about 36 companies. The total assistants were about 50 people from very different places, like: Australia, USA, Belgium, Sweden, Spain, Cánada, and our team from México.

Amongst Atlassian team’s we had the chance to meet product specialists such as: JIRA, Confluence, Service Desk and Hipchat. This was a really good opportunity to meet the team members that otherwise we wouldn’t had the chance to do so. We got first hand feedback from this team which was one of the most valuable things of this trip. Particularly the Atlassian Design leads and Dev Leads from Confluence and each of their components. 
During the week we had some talks about their products, their design principles (very interesting one), and how to built add-ons for their platform.

One notable thing this time around was that we decided to bring a UX designer with the team, and that decision really paid off. Our team was focused from day on building the first version of PlanningWith.Cards’ add-on for Confluence. We were able to define every detail of the interaction, from the creation of the Macro for Confluence, up to playing it and displaying results.

We covered every possible scenario and thanks to good planning, and better execution, we had prepared a fully functional DEMO for Friday.

We compiled feedback from the assistants to the event and this are their thoughts:

PROS: What did you like from the event?

• The direct interaction we had with the developers of the platform (as well as other teams of developers building for the same platform), this is priceless, We simply couldn’t have that much work done in one week if it wasn’t because of their on-site availability.
• The existing (and very extensive) documentation of the platform that already exists.
• The opportunity to know the works and ideas from other teams that are also using add-ons.
• The information provided before-hand was very helpful.
• Food was very good.

CONS: What could’ve been improved?

• The event room was probably not the best. The distribution was not proper as to pitch to 50 people at once.
• One week is not enough, although probably extending it is very unlikely.
• The fact that we couldn’t upload our product to the market place. We’ll have to wait for another week.

This was our experience. What do you think?
We’d love to hear the experiences from other companies involved!