For those who don't know, "Fedex Day" is time set aside for developers to work on whatever they want with a skew towards our products. We tend to run "Fedex" with a fairly open format where you can do whatever you want as long as you can somehow relate it to our products. We have expanded it such that we set aside 1 1/2 days for the developers to complete their ideas. We start after lunch on a Thursday and work until 4pm Friday when we present what we have to everyone.
The goals of "Fedex" are:
- Foster creativity. Atlassian is good at hiring smart people and we'd be mad to keep all that brain-power locked up.
- Scratch itches. Every developer has something that bugs them about our products, or something they'd like to see them do.
- Spike. Often, radical ideas don't get traction because we don't understand how they'd work or what benefit they'd provide.
- Have fun. Institutions like Fedex make Atlassian a fun place to work.
Being the competitive individuals we are we also have a trophy plus bragging rights for the winner.