Not sure if you're intentionally aiming that generalisation at me as an Atlassian user, but I can assure you there are people out there with good intentions at heart!! We are a small team of local devs that have been developing hardware and firmware solutions for the past 3 years, not a front for off-shore third world developers. We bootstrapped our startup with minimal outside investment, so our decisions on the development tools we use have an immediate and real affect on our business. Despite our steady growth, software and tool costs are still something we need to be very mindful of (both upfront and ongoing, cash and labour hours).

I'm not defending Atlassian to the death, I agreed that it has issues, but I think you're being a bit unfair. I'm sure there are script kiddies and shill companies using OTRS too! Are you suggesting that there is something inherent in the Atlassian workflow that promotes this sort of business practice?

We started with github and basecamp and out grew this, so chose Atlassian. Perhaps we will change up again in future, and maybe we can hire someone to upkeep the system as part of their duties. In any case, I'm always on the look out for improvements, so thanks for the advice on OTRS, I'll definitely take a look. :-)

I use Evernote (premium). I started using it years ago and it fell by the way side. I started using it wrong, so it didn't really work for me.

I fired it back up again a year or two ago, and have it organised in a way that parallels my workflow. The biggest thing that actually made it work and become so powerful was to put everything in it. I use the android app to photgraph handwritten notes, napkin sketches, etc., and if there's a key email I forward that to my evernote. I now have thousands of notes, but have used notebooks, titles, and tags to make it all searchable.

Why is it so powerful? I now have everything of import in a single place, so no more wondering if that thing was on a sticky note, email, whatever - I know I can find it easily in evernote. Also, I have a brain like a sieve, so I'm able to dump thoughts to evernote and get on with my life without worrying about forgetting things.

I know it doesn't work for everyone, but it you use it right (i.e. always) it can be very powerful.

When we were looking at options we were drawn to Atlassian because it was very easy to get up and running using their hosted cloud and they seemed to have a solution to cover our full workflow. Previously we used github and Basecamp, but moved to BitBucket, JIRA, and Confluence. We're a very small team, so the solution had to be easy to get running, and we didn't want the hassle of self hosting. We did look at a bunch of free issue tracking and wiki solutions, but found most of them required significant time and effort to get running. We definitely aren't giving Atlassian 5 stars but we haven't found anything better that requires less admin time.

That being said, I feel that JIRA can easily become a tangled mess if not very actively adminned. It's very good as an issue tracker, but very clunky and confusing when in agile scrum mode.

Still, it's a big improvement over our previous workflow.

What are you using?

No worries, it's a good idea!

I know that first comment feel - I only recently started /v/embedded and anytime there's a comment or subscribe I get excited haha

Be a big girl/boy ...

Excuuuse me?! Don't try and force my conformity to your old fashioned gender roles! I identify as trans-dragon-penguin-mouse! /s

What don't you like about Atlassian and JIRA? (serious question)

I use JIRA and Confluence for work. JIRA can be a bit clunky and confusing at times, but I find Confluence very useful. All devs participate in documentation using Confluence so it's our go to. And management types use it for planning and status updates.

I switched to BitBucket a year or two ago. It's great and I recommend it to anyone looking for a github alternative.

I'm not on a free plan though, I use JIRA, Confluence, etc. and everything integrates nicely. Great for a small software and hardware team (yes I have hardware EDA/design files in git too).

It's nifty but really a gimmick. I can't think of many cases where this is better than existing captchas (especially the new Google checkbox ones).

It could be used to filter out impatient and lazy users who just couldn't be bothered with it (I'd be one of them) haha.

Very handy. I discovered a bunch of subverses.

I also added /v/embedded to the list.