ShipIt Wallboard

In 2013 I had just moved to San Francisco and was tapped on the shoulder to help co-ordinate the next ShipIt event. At the time, the Atlassian office in San Francsico was located at a warehouse on Harrison St. The keystone feature of the office was a giant project screen in the middle of the office and a large central staircase that also served as seating for the entire office during presentations and town halls.

A year or so earlier, an Atlassian had built a wallboard for ShipIt. A wallboard is a webapp that functions as a dynamic infographic or information radiator - it can be displayed on a TV screen to show information in the office. That person had since left the company, but I thought it would be awesome to fork their wallboard, bring it up to date and show it on the giant projector screen in the office during ShipIt.

The wallboard had a countdown timer for the start and end of ShipIt, included a live Twitter feed and allowed announcements to be displayed in the header (eg. "pizza is here in the kitchen!"). It certainly looked pretty impressive on such a big screen:

!

Over the next few years, I continued to update the look and feel of the wallboard and improve the configurability of the service. At its peak (probably around ~2018) the wallboard was being used concurrently across all Atlassian offices for global ShipIts.

At one point, the wallboard was popular enough that it became a target for internal mischief makers. They probed the service to find the (unauthenticated) endpooint for adding announcement messages and defaced the wallboards across the offices. You know you're successful once someone tries to hack you!

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