Congratulations to Bitbucket September 30, 2010

I saw that bitbucket has been acquired by aussie company Atlassian.  I was a pro user as I had a few private repositories (hg didn’t originally support sub repositories).  I was always impressed by the customer service at bitbucket and from my dealings I got the impression they were good guys who had the customers interests first.  I changed credit cards and paypal subscriptions stopped working for me and rather than make a big deal out of it, Jesper basically stopped charging me money.  I got it working again eventually, but it’s that kind of attitude that convinced me that they had my interests as a customer first and that I’d made a good choice over competitors or doing it myself.  I know this experience means I recommended them and as a early stage startup it’s an experience that I’ll remember when I’ve (hopefully) got paying customers 😉

So I saw my billing had been cancelled and now it looks like with my current usage I won’t have to pay anything.  It also looks like there’s been a few UX changes around teams etc.  I like the strategy of at the same time as announcing it, it’s rebranded and working.  I previously introduced Atlassians suite into my former workplace (confluence, bamboo, jira, greenhopper, crowd, … ) running over subversion and it always seemed that not having a SCCM system was a weak point to their competitors; so it seems like this is a good strategic investment.  When evaluating tools, the competitors for the most part seemed to be SCCM companies with a layer on top.  The reason I chose Atlassian was that integrated layer on top with confluence, bamboo, jira etc meant for an internationally distributed team, it gave us the focal point for development that we needed.  It will be interesting to see if this is offered for on-premises installation as Atlassian tools are java based and bitbucket with hg I suspect is python based.  I looked at running hg with jython when it first came out but it had a few native modules which would have had to be ported from c to get it running.   Maybe python is ok though, my experience is the people who tend to look after and maintain these systems tend to be biased towards a particular model, eg java or .net, python might be ok for unix guys, but for windows I’m not sure.  Asking either to play outside their comfort area was playing with fire in terms of support, at least in my previous company that’s why we maintained ‘native’ versions with some neat technologies that were baked in house.

So congratulations bitbucket and I’m looking forward to see where it goes from here.

Australian Company Atlassian Raises 60m Financing. July 14, 2010

I’ve been a fan of Atlassian for a long time, at my previous job I introduced the toolset and we ended up buying the enterprise version of everything.    They just signed a 60m investment which is a great sign for the Australian startup sector.   What I found most interesting though was that they started on a 10k credit card and effectively bootstrapped up.  I quit my job and for the last 3 months have been working on bootstrapping my own company (knowtu) and have the typical doubts about whether I’m doing the right thing and with the IT job market booming again it’s hard to ignore the opportunity cost.   It’s inspiring to see that Australian tech companies can be successful.  It would be great if other Australian tech companies shared more of these stories as I think Australian companies have had a lot of success but tend to keep it under their hats.