christopherowen.id.au » atlassian

The clock keeps ticking

Christopher Owen — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:48:10 +0000

Don’t blink, or you might just miss a significant fraction of a year. I’ve made that mistake.

Over three months ago now, I left my position as Technical Lead on Atlassian’s Confluence team. It’s still an odd thing to state. I still believe that Atlassian is one of the best companies in Australia to work for as a software or technical support engineer, especially if Java development takes your fancy. Some of the most passionate and knowledgeable Java developers I have ever known work there. I’d like to thank everyone at Atlassian for their tremendous work and invaluable friendship. I had a truly memorable, enjoyable and productive three years there; they will always be a highlight and serve as a formidable benchmark.

But I’m a hopelessly restless person. I still feel like such an amateur in many respects. I’ve been developing software professionally for coming on a decade now plus many years tinkering with programming before my first paid position and I still feel I’ve much more to learn. I crave new experiences and problems. As such, I’ve taken a new position, working as a software engineer at Silverbrook Research. My first project is being built using Ruby on Rails, something I’ve wanted to learn but never managed to find the time along with everything else I want to do. My new position offers some unique opportunities, and I’m excited to be involved. I hope to blog more about my experiences using this platform.

The wheel keeps turning, and there appears to be never a shortage of interesting problems to solve, or interesting tools to help solve them. Even after all of this time, I still love doing what I do, and working with people who love what they do too.

FedEx Day 8 summarised

Christopher Owen — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:45:04 +0000

Fellow Atlassian Mark Chaimungkalanont has just posted a summary on the mammoth undertaking that was Atlassian’s eighth FedEx day. (We deliver!) A huge congratulations to all participants; it’s always a very exciting time to be at the office when every single engineer at Atlassian is furiously banging out fresh code and fresh ideas.

This was a somewhat emotional FedEx day for me, being almost precisely a year from FedEx Day 6, when things took an unexpectedly bad turn for me and began what was without a doubt the most challenging, and changing six months of my life. I made it all the way to the end this time and I feel so much better than I ever, ever thought I would during those scarily dark days.

I’m also fairly proud of my monstrous creation as well.

Blog stalking

Christopher Owen — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 03:22:33 +0000

I interview a fair few people applying for jobs at Atlassian and more often than not candidates are making reference to various things I’ve posted here on this blog. While this is still a relatively new phenomenon for me it is not at all creepy. Yet most people I talk to seem to be almost relunctant to make it known that they’ve read my blog or apologise about “blog stalking” in the same breath. It is quite okay to talk to me about anything I post here; part of the reason I do write is to encourage discussion, either amongst my colleagues or people I’ve yet to meet. I don’t post anything here that I am not comfortable for a complete stranger to read. In fact, you actually win a bonus point with me when you do show signs of having done some research on me before speaking with me. This isn’t (necessarily) because of any inflation of my ego; the fact that you care enough about the discussion to spend some time getting to know me before hand is a desirable trait. It doesn’t even really matter that much if you try to gain some crude advantage by dropping in a statement such as “Super Mario 64 is the greatest game ever made and Cream by Prince has no equal in pop music”.

In the end, I know a bit about you via your resume so I think it is only fair that you are able to know a bit about me before we meet. It tends to make the discussion smoother because there is already some degree of familiarity between the people involved as the ice is already partially broken. I think that is very much a good thing.