Confluence is good they said
Confluence is awesome they said
Confluence is cloud based and fucking great...

Confluence is starting to lag like it's the 1990's and my keyboard strokes are taking seconds, literal seconds to catch up..

KEYBOARD LAG!! in 2020!!! fuck this JS bullshit.

Big-time Microsoft fan who claims they've been using licensed versions of Windows since Windows 3.0. Still has all old versions of Windows on different machines / hard-disks. They use only Microsoft Surface devices. They still use Nokia Lumia (with Windows Phone 10). They were working with an organization that used Office365 for enterprise email and collaboration. They used Microsoft Teams for team collaboration when the rest of the organization was comfortable with Atlassian tools like jira, confluence and bitbucket.

One fine day, news spreads that the organization is moving into GSuite for enterprise email and collaboration. They are devastated. They quit citing personal and family reasons, but we knew the real reason.

Confluence by Atlassian.

Why the hell does enterprise software get away with not having basic, logical, functionality?!

A hierarchical page structure should allow you to name multiple pages the same as long as they're under different parents.

Every FREE documentation platform understands this, yet atlassian fucking confluence can't figure it out.

I was never a big fan of Github to be used within a company. So about 3 years ago where I used to work I implemented all the tools from Atlassian. Like litteraly all of them. And first I was stunned of the possibilities I had with Jira, Confluence, Bamboo and Bitbucket! But while self-hosting all thoose services you always felt, that Atlassian just bought all thoose companies and "threw them together"
BUT with newest features of Gitlab, I think they outperformed everyone! I absolutely love what they offer, even as a free service. They integrate all features in one product where you would otherwise relay on different products.
Whats important to you when it comes to VCS?

I administer Atlassian stack instance (among zillion other things, of course). Once I've got an issue about login problem:
"I can login to Confluence, but not to Jira, could you help me?"

Looking into projects configuration, into user's permission groups in Crowd (both apps are connected, it will be important in a moment)... Everything looks good. Wtf?

Suddenly, I've got this idea:
"What username do you use in Jira?"
"My username."
"What about Confluence login?"
"My email."

Realization in 3... 2... 1...

Wait for it...

Just a little more tension...

"Nevermind, thank you!"

Remember, guys, always give them a chance. Plan for the worst, but hope for the best. And I wish you all only such issues! :-D

The feeling of dread as still a semi-junior sysadmin when an app doesn't work after an update.

I got stressed, triple-checked everything that I changed and that I followed all steps of the documentation of the upgrade process, then, as a last step before going over in half-panic mode to my boss, I try to restart the stupid java app and it starts working.

Wtf. Why. Why didn't it work the first time I started it? D:

At my previous company, we used tools from all over the place. We switched between tools at will. Sometimes, some team would decide to use some tool while the rest of the company would use something else. The worst part was that there was no Single-Sign-On (SSO) either. Everyone would need to have an account on all of these said tools. It was chaos.

I realized that being integrated into one environment (even though would have the cost of a vendor-lock-in) was the best option to have because in that case, we wouldn't have to deal with operational hurdles like having integration from one tool to another. They would just come baked-in with the whole environment. That's how GSuite (formerly Google Apps for Work), Atlassian and other players succeeded - they gave a complete suite of services / software that integrated well with each other. You could jump back and forth between services without having to bother about integration with other tools. They'd all be there wherever you wanted them to be. Even cloud providers so that opportunity and built on it - Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes (in itself).

Another example is a company that used Jira, Confluence and Hipchat but for some dumb reason used Gerrit for their code review / hosting. Eventually, they realized that managing the integration with the Atlassian tools was far more expensive than getting bitbucket and migrating completely into the Atlassian environment.

It's always the integration that matters. Everything else is secondary.

draft article in atlassian confluence

oops it lost your image when publishing

fuck u atlassian

Project Lead: The DevOps department just got a GitLab instance installed on our internal network. We're gradually going to move all our projects onto it and move away from BitBucket and Jenkins really soon.

Me: Awesome!

Project Lead: We're still using JIRA and Confluence for issue tracking and documentation though because the higher ups said so.

Me:

I am the responsible for the atlassian Suite at work, as I maintain the systems, set them up, and stuff.

One day, our crowd (the authentication and authorization application) just went crazy. At like lunch time it could not connect to the AD anymore. No reasons. Throwing XSRF errors (cross site scripting), because http would connect to https. "won't do it, fuck you" it told me. Out of the blue. Noone changed anything. And yea, seriously. Noone did.
It just refused to connect (as connecting to AD is connecting yourself with you own api. And refusing yourself talking to yourself). It runs behind a proxy. Therefore http/https. Well, this worked for years. But out of sudden not anymore.

Yea. Fuck you.

It was reported some hours later, at like 3pm, as people could not login to the applications using crowd as authentication and authorization server.

Tried to debug the system, where nothing was did, to make it work. At best time to fail.

First workaround: if you are logged into one of the other applications of atlassian, just refresh the site, so your SSO token gets a refresh and you are signed on again.

Then I searched more and more. And more.
But nothing worked, nothing helped.

So I addressed an emergency maintenance, take down the whole Suite, restart crowd, to apply some changes to it's settings, not knowing what happening then, because all connections of SSO will then be released. Sent out the mail like 30 minutes beforehands.

While waiting for the window, I just typed my credentials... And redid, and redid, so to type and being bored.
Three minutes before the window...

It just worked again.

Well. Wtf. Serioudl
Just came back.

No Intrusion, no changes at all. Just came back, as nothing has happened.

Kind of best part of this story... A headhunter messaged me on my way home to offer me a job as an Atlassian Suite SysAdmin for a company, at kinda the double of my salary.

At first I was thinking to go there, and when someone then asked me sth about Atlassian just start to laugh and then leave still laughing...

But then I very nicely respond that I dont want to cry at work. And wished him best luck.

I am doing some bad upgrades now on our Suite. Very painful.
And I looked into the start scripts. Some Look like the untalented intern tells another one to write scripts. Seriously wtf.

Today I followed the guide to Update a confluence and change database to Postgres. Didnt work, Postgres error.
Try it again, jquery won't load. Next try, tomcat not starting anymore. Did same thing. Every fucking time.

Yea. Maintenance window to get a nice new export soon. Will only take an hour.

To switch database in confluence, you need to set it up very fresh. And then Import your export.
Export takes an hour at our system.
Importing maybe the same time. Hope it will work (hint: Nope).

Oh, can be nice also. Just tell the Bitbucket to migrate databases, there is a fucking setting for it. Enter new database, ready, go, finished.

At least they don't raise costs very much every kinda year.
Oh sorry, yes, they do.

Fuck undocumented shit!
I was wondering how to use this one method of the "interface". Googled the name of the program and the specific method.

Got two results.

From the same page.

It's a comment complaining that this shit is undocumented and doesn't work.

If you build something that others use, please, motherfucking please, document your code.
At least some auto generated javadoc, how hard can it be?
You are using the atlassian suite for everything and you have confluence so use it already! The only documentation that actually exists it about a hundred years old, totally useless and covers about 1% of what your product can do.
I like your product but fuck me sideways your documentation sucks balls! Fuck!

That needed to get out.

atlassian confluence you sack of shit I make a page/document, you tell me one of the images is broken after saving

well fuck, how the fuck does this shit happen?

I assume you make oodles of cash from all the fucking companies who use your products and apparently there's no competitors with the level of integration from all the garbage of confluence, jira, bitbucket etc. At this rate maybe you can outdo Gamefreak in terms of ratio of profit to incompetence/laziness.

I was trying to setup a Confluence install on my root behind a Apache Proxy..

I tried all the Atlassian Configs, my own Configs, but nothing works for Tomcat. I redirects you to the infinities of universe. My Apache Configs are all correct.

If you access Confluence directly it also works.

Tomcat you Ass start playing nice with the proxy fucker!

I hate Tomcat now. Go die!

What the hell am I!? I wonder if you guys can help me...

I've been programming most of my life but I've never actually been a developer by title or job role. I thought maybe if I list what I do and have done someone here could help? I'm sure there are more of you in a similar boat.

- C# and VB dev for some quick DBMS projects to help me understand and mine databases and create a nice simple view for project teams to show findings from the data to help make certain decisions.
- Automating a lot of my colleagues work with Python and if very restricted then just VBA macros in Excel and MSP. This did also include creating tools to gather data during workshops and converting the data for input into other systems.
- Brought Linux to the office with most team members now moving over to Linux with the peace of mind to know that though they do need to try solve their own problems, I can help if need be.
- Had to learn AWS and then implement an autoscaling and load balanced data center installation of a few Atlassian toolsets.
- Creating the architecture diagrams documentation needed for things like the above point.
- Having said that, also have ended up setting up all the Jira/Confluence etc. servers we use and have implemented so far whether cloud (Azure/AWS) or on prem and set up scripts to automate where possible.
- Implemented an automated workflow view in SharePoint based on SP list data and though in an ASPX page, primarily built in JS.
- Building test systems in PHP/JS with Laravel and Angular to help manage integration between systems. Having quite a time right looking into how to build middleware to connect between SOAP and REST API's, the trouble caused more by the systems and their reliance on frameworks we're trying to cut out of the picture.
- Working on BI and MI and training a team to help on the report creation so that I can do the fun creative stuff and then set them to work on the detail :)

Actually it seems safe to say that it seems that though I've finally moved into a dev office (beforehand being the only developer around) I seem to be the one they go to when a strategic solution is needed ASAP and the normal processes can't be followed (fun for someone with a CompSci degree and a number of project management courses under the belt... though I honestly do enjoy the challenges)

But I always end up Jack of all but master of, well hopefully some at least. let's not even get started on the tech related hobbies from circuit design and IoT to Andoid / iOS and game dev and enjoying a bit of pen testing to make sure we're all safe at work and at home.

As much as I don't like boxes, I'm interested to know if there is in fact a box for me? By the way, the above is just a snapshot of my last two years minus the project management work...

My word. The way how bad and patchy the Atlassian Server SDK is documented makes development of JIRA and Confluence plug-ins an absolute horror story.
Nothing fucking works the way you'd expect it to, the development server takes upwards of 5 minutes to simply refresh a page and oooh the shit ton of money this wacky piece of horseshite costs my employer makes my head explode.
But the worst thing is:
We just have to fucking make some easy stuff we could completely just use static pages for to talk to JIRA's REST API, but someone in management made using confluence an acceptance criteria, cause some asshats somewhere else in our company made a custom confluence space - based thingy for another customer "and that's cool"
Fml