Spartez Does Street Art

Ever since we moved to our new office last year, something seemed to be missing. Yes, the new office is bigger, better, more comfortable and better suited for our ever increasing crew than the rudimentary office that we had before. But - the new office did not have any character. If you walked in, you would not be able to tell if you are in Gdansk, Bangalore, San Francisco or St Petersburg. Same beige walls as in any office. Same Aeron chairs. Same grey floor. Same Ikea desks. Even air conditioning has exactly the same controller panel model that I saw in any other office I have ever visited. One word describes it - boring.

As we want to make our company a Great Place To Work, we had to think of something to somehow make the office special.

To this end, we contacted two local street artists - Vera and Julia - to paint some cool graffiti on our walls.

Now our office is different from everybody else's.

Take a Look

Some Details

Artists At Work

BTW, we are still looking for developers (note that we are _very_ picky), so if you would like to work for us, feel free to drop us an e-mail at jobs@spartez.com.

After the party

So few days ago we hosted a house-warming party in our new, shiny (sorry, I meant, noisy - our neighbours are still finishing their offices) office.

Honestly, I completely did not know what to expect. After all we just throw an invitation at a few places: on Twitter and Facebook obviously, a few posters at local universities, a few mentions at local conferences and users groups ... and a full-fledged bill-board at one of the most crowded street-crossings in Gdańsk.

I did not know who and how many people would sign up. The results far exceeded my dreams. Nearly 90 people signed up, vast majority of them showed up at the event. We hoped to attract 30 - 50 guests, so I dare say it exceed our expectations by far :)
Actually I had to close the registration due to too big interest (I really did not know if we can fit so many people in our 300 m2) more than 2 days before the event and on the quickly opened waiting list we quickly got almost 10 people wanting to join us.

All in all everything went quite smooth. So many people managed to squeeze in our office. Actually we could fit probably 30 - 40 more (in terms of raw floor space), but our air-conditioning barely handled those who showed up (it was really too hot when most of the people were in a single room when I was doing the presentation).

I was afraid that random people would come - e.g. those just interested in having a free drink or a fist fighting ;). Fortunately they were no such guests. It looks like all people were genuinely interested in our company (both Spartez and Atlassian), wanted to share something, learn something (we hosted a few young startupers) or were interested in one of the jobs we are offering.

After initial mingling I presented a few things: a short history of Atlassian with the emphasis of its values and how the attracted us to, a short history of Spartez (including revealing the mystery of how our company was founded and why such name was picked) and then I very quickly presented those several positions for which we are looking for people:

• Team Leader 
• Front-end developers
• Java developers (all levels, including our highly wanted principal)
• UX engineer
• Product manager
• QA engineer

BTW, we are still looking (I mentioned we are _very_ picky), so feel free to drop us an e-mail at jobs@spartez.com.

Then there was a time for a lot of questions and honestly I was completely swamped for next hour or so by a lot of people who pinned me down and wanted to know much more. Great conversations. It turned out that there are several people really interested in invigorating our Tricity geek scene. JUGs, JS meetups, Scala meetups, Agile parties, hackathons - we don't have them too often in Gdansk and area.  I got a few very good connections and I hope to co-host some interesting meetups in the near future. Stay tuned.

After several more chats, I felt so much tired, that I sneaked out to our fussball table to witness the finals (we did organize the fussball championships - big kudos to Orzech for that) - unfortunately we were not very hospitable here and two Spartez pairs made it to the final.

Then I landed in our poker room where Filip Rogaczewski was cheating winning with other players (of course no gambling, just free chips) in Texas Hold'em. He won also my pool, but finally there was a draw between two last players - they bet with "all in" and both had exactly the same full house. And they gave up further play. Perfect solution.

All in all that was a very pleasant evening. After 10 PM we started heading home.

There were no damages, no beer spilled (but at poker table, which is like a rule), no one got sick. Food was decent, chats were great and the guests were awesome.

Thank you for joining us. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope to celebrate with you in the future too.

Special thanks for Spartez crew for organizing and taking care of this event! I owe you guys beer! Help yourself from our fridge. :)
And special kudos to my awesome sister and brother-in-law for taking these wonderful pictures.

House-warming Party in Gdańsk - come chat with us on 5th of November

On 5th of November we are hosting a House-warming party in our new office.
If you are already our friend, or want to learn more about what we are doing (especially in Atlassian ecosystem) or perhaps if you are looking for a new job - please join us after 5 PM next week. You can find detailed map on our website.

We have announced the event week ago and so far more people have registered than we originally hoped for. Due to space limitations at our venue, we will have to close soon the registration. There are less than 20 slots (free!) left - so hurry up.

Except for having a good time in the evening, we would like to use this opportunity to spread the word that we are hiring.
We are still looking for several talented and passionate guys (who want to work in a very casual environment, with around 30 colleagues locally and millions customers globally).
We are looking most of all for:

• Java developers
• Javascript/front-end developers
• UX Designer
• Product Manager
• Team Lead (with very strong fresh technical background)

If you are interested, come and talk to us during the event or/and apply via e-mail (jobs@spartez.com) or using this online form (not all jobs may be currently listed there).

We are moving!

This year we will be celebrating the fifth anniversary of our company. That was a crazy period of time – so much has happened!

From the very beginning we have been very closely cooperating with Atlassian – an awesome Australian company which brought to the world such software masterpieces like JIRA, Confluence, Crucible or Bamboo. We have also provided custom solutions (related to Atlassian products) to many leading Polish and foreign companies. Finally our commercial products have been purchased by several hundred companies from all over the world, including: VISA, Wells Fargo, Warner Bross Games, Siemens, TF SKOK, DB Schenker and Amazon. Wow!

We have been present (speaking and even sponsoring) at dozens of software development conferences and geek meetups in Poland and abroad. I think we have earned some good reputation (and a title of the most picky recruiters in the area).

Over the course of years we have been contributing more and more to Atlassian products and, lo and behold, we proved that we know pretty well how to develop software and slowly by constantly we have been expending our tight partnership with Atlassian.

Now the time has come to make much bigger leap.

Recently together with Atlassian we have hired several new awesome software developers (we are still hiring!). And ... we have finally outgrew our first cosy office – a house in the backyards in the very centre of Gdansk – between Wrzeszcz and Oliwa districts – in Strzyża (Australians claim we are insane with saving so much on vowels :)). Though we love so much this area that we decided to stay in this district and move to a new place very close to our current office.

So this week we are moving to a brand new A class office building – Garnizon Omega building, where we will be one of the first tenants.

That's an awesome place (just look at the pictures – they are real!). Walking distance from trams, SKM (Tricity train), bus tops, 5 - 7 min walk from our biggest shopping mall – Baltic Gallery. And the place is quite silent – 200 or 300 m away from the noise of the main Grunwaldzka street. With New Słowackiego street almost ready (and already available for car traffic) it's also very conveniently located for people commuting from suburbs via Tricity highway (like I do personally). We almost doubled our effective office space there and we hope that it will serve us well for next few years.

We are still a small company (just exceeding 20 people) and we are proud of it. We used to work for big behemoth corporations and we know how much better is to work in a company where everyone knows each other and where things get simply done instead of being talked about. With new people hopefully joining us over the course of next months, we will grow significantly but we are sure we will still maintain the spirit of a cozy company with very few rules (common sense instead) and a great atmosphere. After all, anthropologists believe that a group of people (a tribe) can operate cohesively and efficiently up to 100 (some say even 200) people without too many extra rules, laws and enforced norms. And the lack of rules, laws and enforcement norms is what we really like. We still have a lot of capacity for growth till we even get close to such limit :)

Today we all visited our new office to pick the place for our desks (and see it in reality).

That's not our former office :)

Nope. It's not our new office :). It's a house being dismantled (well demolished) which was on our way. Could not resist taking a picture.

View from our office

One of our open space rooms

A dedicated bicycle lot with 3 showers! Yes, yes, yes!

We are going to organize a housewarming party in September. As the final decoration works are still in progress, we cannot announce the exact date yet. Stay tuned!

Scrum Standup in JIRA and Confluence

What? 

Scrum Standup plugins for JIRA and Confluence have been released.

They are available to download and try from https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/849934

Scrum Standup plugin for JIRA allows to quickly create a daily written standup report and link it with the issues you have worked on. It takes only a minute or two to prepare standup note. Just few clicks and few words - no worries about layout, edit conflicts, issue searching and linking hardness, no too large page kills your browser problem.
Scrum Standup plugin for JIRA contains dedicated view to display all daily standup notes for a project - great place for managers and absent folks.
Built in and configurable email notifications can keep you up to date with the ongoing team progress.

Take a look:

Scrum Standup plugin for Confluence allows to retrieve standup notes from JIRA and display them on the Confluence page. It gives you everything you need to familiarize yourself with the team progress on a single wiki page. Just open and read.

Screenshots:

Scrum Standup plugins for JIRA and Confluence are ready to download and try from https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/849934


Why?

There are two problems we want to solve with Scrum Standup plugins

Problem 1: Gather people together for a daily standup meeting.

Let's imagine following scenario.

You are a part of a team which uses JIRA for issue tracking. The team is small, agile and try to practice Scrum. You have a sprint planning meeting every two weeks when you prioritize backlog and estimate user stories, you try to meet every day on a short standup meeting so everyone in the team is up to date with others work, you perform a demo and sprint retrospective at the end of iteration. All of that helps your team to work smarter with no additional effort. Sweet... but what if:

• One or more of your team members work remotely and your team is dispersed. 
• Part of your team works in a different timezone and there are 9 hours of difference. 
• Some of the team members are 'burn the midnight oil' geeks and start work in the afternoon. 
• People get sick or their kids get sick and they work from home for a few days. 
• Someone started to build a house of dream and works in totally unpredictable manner. 
• There are other reasons which make it difficult to gather people together every day at specified time. 

In terms of sprint planning or retrospective meetings it is not a big problem. They happen once a week, biweekly or even more rarely so it is not very painful to gather people and perform video or Skype meeting. People tend to agree for an afternoon or very early morning meeting if it happens no more than once a week. They can get up early this day, take a baby sitter and deal with their private stuff another day. No big deal.

Scrum standup meeting is a different story. It happens daily so if you run into one of the listed above cases it may be impossible to gather the team together at the same time everyday.
There are many solutions:

• Reorganize your project and team so there are no remote folks.
• Run Scrum of Scrums. 
• Meet your remote product owner once a week instead of every day. 
• Start daily standup meeting even if half of the team is absent.
• Run daily standup meeting before lunch when most of your staff is there. 

Anything can be a solution. If you found it, people are happy and project is going smoothly then you are lucky and can stop reading here. You probably don't need anything more.

If nothing works or you are simply not satisfied how the things go then written reports and Scrum Standup plugin may be an answer.

Problem 2: What was done yesterday.

Have you ever run into one of the following?

• You missed last standup meeting or even worse, you were sick for a few days and feel that you don't know the current state of the project. 
• You get back to work and want to know what happened when you were off. 
• You have a problem and remember that someone fixed similar thing a week ago. Unfortunately your remote team is sleeping right now and you can't find who was that and how to find a fix among tens of SCM commits. 

Again there are many ways to deal with the problem:

• Check activity stream of your JIRA project.
• Go through SCM commits.
• Use JIRA search to find the correct issue or comment.
• Use Assembla/Github/Bitbucket search to find the right commit. 

If it works for you in all cases and you feel you don't need anything more just stop reading here.

If it does not work or you feel you miss something, written reports and Scrum Standup plugin may be an answer again.

That's why we decided to create Scrum Standup plugins for JIRA and Confluene.

You can download and try them from https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/849934
Bugs and feature requests can be raised at: https://jira.spartez.com/jira/browse/SSJ

Enjoy,
Scrum Standup team.

Approver Plugin For Confluence

Atlassian Confluence is a fine product, but so far it  has been lacking an important feature - there was no way to show your approciation of somebody's contributions (pages, blog posts, even comments), other than by commenting on them. This was in stark contract with places like Google+ or Facebook, where you can simply click a "+1" or "Like" button to quickly say that you like what somebody said.

To address that, we have created a simple, but powerful Confluence plugin - the Approver.

This plugin adds a widget to your Confluence pages, in a form of a "Thumbs up" button with a small counter. When you click this button, you annnounce to everybody that can read the page that you "approve" ("like", "+1") the content just above it. The widget appears at the bottom of every page, as well as next to each comment. Whan you click the button, it turns to blue, so that you know whether or not you already "approved". When you click the counter, you are shown a list of everybody who also "approved"

But wait, there is more. In addition to this button, Approver can optionally add Google+'s "+1" and Facebook's "Like" buttons to every page or comment. This lets you share your opinions about the content with the whole world. Enable and use these with caution though - they expose your Confluence URLs (but not the content) to everybody on Google+ or Facebook. So if you consider these URLs secret, you should disable this option.

Approver can be downloaded from our web page at http://approver.spartez.com/, or from Atlassian Plugin Exchange

Here are some screenshots of Approver in action

closeup of all buttons on a page

full page with Approver buttons and approvers list