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I'm gonna be the Wiki-techie! (oh no)

I was recently contacted by Atlassian's Wiki Evangelist (yes, appearantly that's a real title!), Stewart Mader. He asked me to consider their new site, Wikipatterns.com, and also forward the site to my dear readership. Done!

In other but related news, I've been (somewhat unwillingly) appointed our next Confluence administrator. This means I'll be given full control over the wiki (muhuhaha) , meaning in effect I'll be able to try out new plug-ins, manage spaces, bully people around, etc.

It also means I'll have to do upgrades, booring user adminstration, figure out funky stacktraces that are appearing in Confluence for some odd reason, fix the database, etc, etc.

The main reason I have volunteered to do this job is that no-one else wanted to do it, and I believe our Wiki is far too critical to leave in the hands of our IT service provider like our CTO would've had it. When are you people gonna understand that Windows is not meant for hosting?

Additionally, I'll hopefully learn alot about Linux, DNS stuff, routing, network, hosting java applications, databases and user management (with LDAP).

These things aren't always relevant in my daytime job, but sooner or later the software we produce will end up in the hands of IT techies who want the software to work, log and do error reporting in a certain way.

And when all boils down to it, Confluence is still a java web application that runs on Tomcat, which is very similar to the products I develop. Having been responsible for hosting Confluence will therefore make me a better software developer.

I've got lots of other things to blog about, but no time to do them right now. Subjects include:

  • Finalizing the CMS requirements with its most important element: Extendability
  • How I became a certified Scrum Master (and what I learned)
  • The programming designer, the new breed of web developers
Stay tuned.
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Comments

  1. Anonymous4/3/07 23:19

    Thomas,

    If you need assistance translating those "funky stacktraces" please feel free to submit a support issue (with logs) at http://support.atlassian.com. Even better, from the same website, you can hop on live chat to discuss Confluence issues with one the Atlassian support engineers. As your company's new Confluence administrator, we're here for you!

    Cheers,
    Donna McGahan
    --Atlassian Support Engineer

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thommy Bommen4/3/07 23:44

    The Wikipatterns website is a good source of information if you need any Wiki Adoption Patterns.

    Looking forward to see the post on Scrum!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous6/3/07 01:31

    I have two words: "Virtual Machine". Ok, four: "MindTouch Deki". I've just upgraded from the free version to the pro version. It's delightfully easy to use and install. Also, they update the application automatically. http://mindtouch.com/deki&subsection=Download

    I came to them by way of www.opengarden.org.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Stewart Mader9/3/07 21:55

    Hi Thomas,
    As Donna said, we're here to help. Thanks for mentioning Wikipatterns, BTW!
    Best regards,
    Stewart Mader
    Wiki Evangelist, Atlassian

    ReplyDelete

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