The history of Atlassian, from the perspective of a younger developer

Disclaimer: This post is based on my own experiences and research - it’s possible I got some details wrong. Feel free to correct me on anything if you have extra historical context!

When I think of Atlassian, I envision a B2B SaaS powerhouse that somehow stayed (comparatively) under my radar most of my career. Despite being around for 20-plus years, it didn’t infiltrate my daily workflows as much as you might expect for a company of its stature. Sure, I would see Jira tickets at previous jobs or occasionally spin up a free Bitbucket repo in college. But those moments were few and far between.

At Airbnb, we used Jira to keep track of infrastructure fires - everything from urgent server issues to recurring tasks. In theory, that system would have kept our entire team in sync. In practice, we were moving so fast that a lot of tickets were either skipped or closed retroactively after we’d already solved the problem. On the version control side, when I was a broke college student, Bitbucket caught my attention simply because it let me have a private Git (originally Mercurial) repo for free. That was a lifesaver for group projects and side gigs - otherwise I would’ve had to pay GitHub for private repos at the time.

For me, Atlassian was always a bit like a giant in the corner - clearly huge and successful, but not always at the forefront of my personal toolset. And yet, nearly every large enterprise I’ve encountered has some piece of the Atlassian stack. So, how did it become this quiet yet colossal force in software collaboration?

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