Tommi Laukkanen was one of our most prolific Codegeist entrants this year — submitting four individual plugins, each of which was very cool. I was even more impressed after reading his blog entry about the process where he reveals that these were the first Atlassian plugins he had ever written! He writes about the experience:
I hadn’t coded Jira plugins before so I started from a simple Parent Issue Summary plugin that improves the usability of issue lists when organization is using issue sub-tasks. It was fun to learn how other’s have implemented APIs in their system. Jira’s API turned out to be very developer friendly and well documented. One can always learn great deals of API development by coding plugins for different software (and of course by using the API that he/she is developing aka eat your own dog food).
He then went on to code the Random Issues Filter Portlet, the Confluence Page Portlet and the Agile Wall Report. All of those in six weeks! As Tommi said, “After coding the first plugin it felt too easy so I had to go on.” So, you have it first hand: writing plugins is easy, fun and potentially profitable. What are you waiting for?
