Added by Jonathan Nolen, last edited by Jonathan Nolen on Jan 30, 2008  (view change)

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The envelope, please....

Thank you all for your patience, but I'm excited to finally be able to announce the winners of Atlassian's first Codegeist Plugin Competition. In Codegeist, contestants had eight weeks to develop, document and submit a previously unreleased plugin for JIRA or Confluence. With $10k in cash prizes and heaps of free software licenses at stake, the competition was fierce.

Thirty individual authors submitted thirty-one new plugins, all of which will be officially moving into the Plugin Libraries this week. The plugins are of the highest quality; there is some very impressive work in that collection. I'll be featuring some of them in the blog over the coming weeks, but I encourage you to check them out for yourself as soon as possible. You'll undoubtedly find something useful for your organization.

Judging was carried out by the Atlassian developers. They examined each of the plugins in turn, evaluating them on their usefulness, creativity, completeness and quality. The judges also considered the new functionality that each plugin offered, examined how well the plugin was written and reviewed the comprehensiveness of the plugin's documentation.

And after exhaustively delving into the details of each plugin, the developers selected these four as their top picks:

First Prize

The Confluence Repository Plugin, from Dan Hardiker of Adaptavist.

Once you've installed the Repository Plugin, it will phone home to the Plugin Library and generate a list of all the plugins that are compatible with your installation of Confluence. A Confluence Administrator can then automatically download and install the plugins from the Library with the click of a button (including upgrading the Repsoitory Plugin itself). The Repository Plugin will also highlight the plugins you have already installed and point out the ones that are installed, but need to be upgraded.

The Confluence Repository Plugin deserves top honors for three reasons. First, it's a substantial piece of work, tackling a complex problem and solving it thoroughly. Second, it was well written, well designed and well documented. And third, Dan's work on the plugin will ultimately benefit every plugin author in the community by helping their plugins to be more widely known and more easily used.

Prizes

First prize is worth $5k. In addition, Dan will receive:

  • a conference pass to The ServerSide Symposium - where the best Java engineers on the planet meet (and you might just meet some Atlassian folks too!).
  • a personal license for JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA- the best Java IDE and weapon of choice for Atlassian engineers.
  • a license for Cenqua Fisheye - the version control portal, grokking our SCM on a daily basis.
  • a workstation license for Cenqua Clover - the original-and-best code coverage tool.
  • a personal license for the YourKit Java Profiler - the profiler that makes JIRA continually faster and leaner.
  • and a one-year subscription to Mindreef® SOAPscope®- the industry's leading tool for capturing and investigating Web services--Mindreef SOAPscope is used to test our remote APIs.
  • four online book subscriptions from Sourcebeat - because no matter how good a developer you are, you can never know enough.

Honorable Mention

Conflickr, from Aron Gombas of Midori

As Aron wrote, "Flickr is groovy, just like wikis. So why not leverage both?" The Conflickr Plugin gives you full access to Flickr API. You can display photos, sets, groups, users and tags. This plugin was a big hit with everyone here, as we have some avid Flickr users in the office. As a bonus, Aron also threw in a Google AdSense Macro, so you can earn cash while people look at your Flickr-graphically decorated pages.

The Metadata Plugin, from Andy Armstrong of Pantero.

The Metadata plugin is a little less flashy, but perhaps even more useful. It allows you to assign arbitrary metadata to any page in Confluence and then generate reports based on those values. You can also search on them, and you can even manipulate them via the remote API. This can be used in an almost limitless number of ways. For example, I'm going to use it to generate an automatically updated list of all of the plugin authors from the Plugin Libraries.

Prizes

Each of the honorable mention prizes are worth $2k. In addition, they'll honorably receive:

Best Hack

The Exec Plugin from Andre Lüpke

This plugin ran away with the prize for Best Hack. It's both useful and potentially evil. Installing this plugin will let you execute unix scripts on the host system from inside a Confluence page. Incredibly useful for things like showing system stats or CVS history. Or incredibly dangerous for doing things like 'rm -rf /'.

Actually, it's not nearly as dangerous as it seems. The author made sure that you could only run scripts that have been placed in a particular directory, so you don't have full access to the system from Confluence. But it was still a pretty ingenious bit of hacking. We were all impressed (and a little scared) by its potential.

Prizes

The Best Hack prize is good for $1k. In addition, to continue your flouting of technological norms you'll receive:

Everyone

Everyone who entered will receive a swank Atlassian Codegeist t-shirt, which are at the printer now and will start slowly weeding their way through the international postal system in a few days. So watch your mailbox, and wear it with pride. (The t-shirt, not your mailbox. That would be uncomfortable.)

Special Thanks to our Sponsors

Our sincere thanks to JetBrains, The ServerSide, Cenqua, Mindreef, YourKit and Sourcebeat. You guys rock - not just for donating some cool prizes. But without you, we simply wouldn't be able to build our software.