Added by Jonathan Nolen, last edited by Jonathan Nolen on Mar 04, 2007  (view change)

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The Atlassian Codegeist is officially closed

We are no longer accepting any more entries. Thanks for participating, and watch this space for details about our next contest.

That's right, people. It's time to show us your stuff. We're announcing Atlassian Codegeist: our first, official plugin competition.

We're giving away fabulous cash and prizes to the person or team who comes up with the coolest, most useful, most elegant plugin for either of Atlassian's products: JIRA, the professional issue tracker and Confluence, the enterprise wiki.

As with anything in life, there are rules. These are yours.

The Competition

What
  • Your contest submission will be a plugin for JIRA or Confluence (or several plugins working together, across products).
  • All plugins must be contributed under an approved open-source license.
  • You may only submit plugins - no modifying of the product source code. (You are, however, welcome to read, copy, extend and override the product source code under the regular terms of your license.)
  • You're not allowed to submit a plugin that has already been posted in either of the Plugin Libraries (JIRA, Confluence). We're after new stuff, people. However, if you would like to extend or enhance an existing plugin (even one written by Atlassian), then go for it. But understand that you will be judged only on the additions you've made.
  • If you're stuck for a good idea, check out the Plugin Wishlist page, which has a load of suggestions for plugins that someone, somewhere thought would be interesting and useful. (There is no guarantee that these ideas actually are interesting or useful, but they may be worth a shot.)
When:

Plugins must be submitted no later than 11:59pm, March 19th, 2006 (UTC/GMT +11).

Who

Teams may include up to but no more than three people. (See official rules for eligibility.)

How Often

Enter as many plugins as you like. Individuals may enter as members of more than one team.

Prizes

Each prize consist of cash (in $USD) and a series of other goodies from Atlassian's favourite Java companies around the world.

Here are the prize packs we have lined up at the moment (there may be more exciting announcements coming, stay tuned!):

First prize: $USD 5000

Let's face it: schwag is nice, but you really want cash. Enough cash to buy your own island. Well, we can't do much about the island, but you can win enough dough to buy a pretty tricked-out system.

In addition, for your developing pleasure you'll 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 (2x): $USD 2000

Not every one can be a winner. But at least you can avoid being a loser. We've got two $2000 Honorable Mention prizes up for grabs. And hey, two grand still enough for a nice laptop.

In addition, you'll honorably receive:

Best Hack: $USD 1000

We have a highly developed sense of humor. And we're willing to put our money where our funny-bone is. We'll pony up $1000 for the most egregious misuse of technology involving our products. If you can figure out how to turn JIRA into a robot bartender, then hats off (and maybe $1000) to you, my friend.

In addition, to continue your flouting of technological norms you'll receive:

Everyone (We know you're really doing this for the free t-shirt.)

All entrants get a stylish Atlassian t-shirt. Be the envy of all the geeks at the next conference you attend.

Thanks 

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

The Criteria

All plugins will be judged by members of the Atlassian Dev team, based on the following criteria:

Usefulness

Ideally, the plugin you develop should be good for something. The more people and organizations who might find your plugin useful, the better we'll like it.

Creativity & Elegance

We admire innovative thinking and outside-the-box coding. You'll get points for novel, interesting or groundbreaking solutions.

Completeness

Your plugin should attempt to solve a specific problem and you should solve that problem as completely as possible. Don't leave obvious holes in functionality.

Code quality and documentation.

Finally, we'll be looking at the quality of the code and the documentation. Your code should be readable, self-evident and easily-maintainable. You should also include a tests with your plugin. This is a major area we will look at to assess code quality.

Because all entries will be contributed to the Atlassian Developer Network plugin libraries, your project should be ready for others to use and build on. Plugin projects should be properly laid-out and well documented. They should use Maven 2 and our archetypes and POMs where available. And they should include the build files, documentation, instructions and any collateral another developer would need to start contributing to your project.

What's in this for Atlassian?

  1. New plugins make our products more capable, which helps us sell more licenses. (Gotta move the units.)
  2. We want more people to learn how to develop plugins. Once they try it, we hope they'll think it's fun and keep doing it. (Leading to #1.)
  3. We want to learn how we can make writing plugins smoother and easier. If you run into any frustrations or questions while you're creating your masterpiece, let us know and we'll make it better.
  4. We're damned excited to see what you, our users, build!