2009/02/06
Wah, been super-busy recently. Just a quick update on some things, including our first ever bit of marketing...
The Recession - we're recruiting!
It's pretty grim seeing lots of high street stores here in the UK lay off staff or go in to liquidation. There's a real chance that this recession could turn in to a deflation - most of the other recessions have been about getting inflation under control, this one is about preventing deflation which is a real possibility after a widespread financial crisis.
However, for Adaptavist, the recession has had an unexpected side effect - we've seen a huge increase in sales as large corporates slash IT budgets and start looking are more agile and affordable solutions - such as wikis!
So, we're looking to take some more staff on including Java developers, CSS gurus and more. Due to work being so busy, our careers section hasn't been updated yet, but if you're looking for work get in touch sooner rather than later to beat the surge!
We're marketing... you!
We've never really been keen on marketing, preferring instead to rely on good reputation and word-of-mouth to bring us in more sales leads than we can handle. With everyone telling us we should be doing some marketing we've decided to market customers instead (which would have the side effect of marketing us as an added bonus). We've got a range of opportunities on offer:
- Case studies - roughly a page of A4
- Longer interviews - for more in-depth reviews
- Atlassian webinars - we can put you in touch with the right people
- ReadWriteWeb article - a chance go get mentioned on ReadWriteWeb (hurry though - need submissions by mid-February)
We're also giving away discounts and some free tickets to Atlassian's worldwide "Summit" conference that's taking place later this year over in the US.
Interested? Fill out this form.
Atlassian Summit
Atlassian's first ever worldwide conference is taking place in San Francisco, USA - May 31st to June 2nd, 2009. Adaptavist are proud to be sponsoring the event and will be doing a few presentations at the event, along with some customers like Sun Microsystems.
Knowing us, we'll be having some festivities in the evenings and we'd love to see you there! Fill out that form I mentioned above to get discounted or free tickets 
Plugins
The pace of development for our Theme Builder and Community Bubbles plugins is really starting to pick up. Theme Builder 3.3.3 has recently gone in to Release Candidate stage and Bubbles 1.2 (sticky topics!) has just hit it's first Milestone release.
But did you know that we've also been revisiting all of our open source plugins as well? Almost all of them are now, or soon will be, compatible with Confluence 2.9 and Confluence 2.10. You can find all of our open source plugins in our imaginatively titled Open Souce space.
In other plugin news, we have a general rule that our commercial plugins should support the last 3 versions of Confluence when releases are made. However, for our Community Bubbles plugin, it looks like we're soon going to have to make it require Confluence 2.10 (which has only just been released) to take advantage of the new APIs and avoid some really nasty development problems with older versions of Confluence. If you're looking to use Bubbles, try and get your Confluence instance upgraded sooner rather than later.
ProTip: Contracts
Have you ever struggled getting a new contract ready for customers? We have - legalese really does make everything impossible to understand unless you go through a lawyer, which takes ages. So, take the legalese version of your contract and send it to the Plain English Campaign - they'll convert it to plain English in a matter of days and your legal bods can do a quick check to make sure the legal meaning hasn't been affected. It's a great way to make life easier for staff and customers!
Other Stuff
There's probably a whole bunch of other stuff that I'm forgetting (been really hectic recently) - but here's a few bullet points of stuff off the top of my head (most of this is old news that we didn't manage to publish):
- Adaptavist is growing fast - our bank balance has doubled and our headcount has tripled in the last year or so
- Our lead developer, Dan Hardiker, is now a on the Steering Committee for http://devoxx.com (formerly http://javapolis.com)
- One of our new recruits, Edward Robertshaw (look at his "doorbell" blog posts), is possibly an evil genius (or just plain insane)
- My wife is shouting me telling me that my "cheese on toast" is going cold. Ah, I live such a rock and roll lifestyle! Gotta go...
