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I spent quite lot of time working near Barbican. I got to spend lot of time walking on the high walks, which is an elevated pathway inside Barbican, connecting each and every building. It is a good walk. The reason why I like Barbican is because of the architecture. Not everyone will like it but if you are a fan of Brutalist architecture then Barbican is your heaven. Each and every building there is grey and look really cool.

You can reach Barbican in different ways, Barbican, Moorgate and Bank station being the nearest.

If you walk on the highways you will get to see some portions of old London walls still in existence. These benches are there in case you want to have your lunch.

London Museum is also there and it is free (except some events). This building seems very old is right next to the London Wall and London Museum.

Did I mention there is a lake there as well. This place is usually crowded and I never really sat there to have my lunch but in case you like water and fountains you have this option.

The old and new building looks really nice together.

There is a Church as well.

The Church window is amazing.

Posters of events at Museum of London.

There are 3 really tall residential towers in Barbican. I think they are tallest in London (may be whole UK I guess)

You can get lost in Barbican so these boards will save you.

I quite miss going there, yes I know it is sad. I miss the post lunch walks. London is crowded and noisy but in case you want to escape that Barbican can be a good option. May be start with the museum and then walk around. There are free tours as well which I never took, you can check there website for more details. Barbican is a proper city within a city. There are residential blocks, library, school, theatre, lake, restaurants and places to sit :)

I hope you enjoyed a bit different kind of post on my site. Lately I have been writing and sharing short technical post but I think from time to time I can also write some photo stories.

Have a nice day. Bye.

This is Pune which is a really beautiful city near Bombay, there was a time when I used to travel quite a lot in India. Many years ago I started providing consultation around Atlassian tools. I consider myself lucky that I got the opportunity to travel and also to work with many companies across India.

I was hoping to travel to India this month but as we all know things are different all across the world. AUG Pune invited me to speak and do a session. Although I would have loved to do that in person but I will settle with an online session this year.

Topic: Improve Jira Ticket Quality with Dynamic Fields in ScriptRunner
Date: 23rd August 2020
Time: 10:30 BST (15:00 IST)
RSVP: Click here

Let me share more pictures :)

Session pic

In my 17 years of career as of 2020 February I have worked from home for many years however I never felt for even a single second that I am not connected to my team or I am not engaged with the work I am doing. I have honestly more memories of me working in a corporate culture than staring my computer screen because you remember time you spent with people than alone in your room. There are pros and cons of WFH but if you are like me who like to get things done then I am sure you will appreciate quietness and solitude.

I first did WFH firstly in 2004 just one year after I started my career, when honestly WFH was unheard of. When I started working for Alcatel-Lucent after few year of joining I worked with a team in Europe where I was in India so WFH was the obvious option because me going to an office was no different then me WFH. That was in early 2010s when online collaborative tools were quite mature.

What are my thoughts on working from home and how more companies will adopt remote working

1. WFH doesn't mean no work.

I usually end up working more than usual when working from home. I genuinely believe in the idea of flow. It is basically a state of mind when you get high value productive work done. I don't think it happens for most people and that is why people working in companies follow a routine or a system. When working from home just follow a system. Human mind is weak. It wants to do simple thing. Blame evolution where mind wants us to pick easy stuff. But we don't live in jungle now and can buy food from Tesco instead of sharping a stone to hunt for dinner. Point is that you need to follow a system to reach a flow state or at least get some work done. It can happen often when you give time uninterrupted to your work. I wake up at 4 AM to start working on tough tasks and the moderate to easy tasks for rest of the day. The time I save from not traveling is something I don't waste as well. Point is WFH will give you more time that you can use to do more stuff. Use the time to do exercises or relaxing.

2. You save money

In most countries traveling cost money. Apart from saving time you save money as well.

3. Change your environment

I have a primary workstation where I do most of my work but I have spots in my house where I shift no change the physical environment. When I am doing some light work that doesn't require 101% of my attention then I move to may be my living room where I can sit on a dining table. Sometimes I go to library as well, it is very important to go a bit outside. This change of physical environment is very important otherwise I get slightly grumpy.

4. I follow a time table and follow it

When I am in the office working on something then the moment it is 5 PM I have to leave and of course I plan to finish the work by 5 so I can leave on time. I don't like working late because it disturbs other things. I have to catch my train and reach home on time. When WFH I follow the same time. Just plan to finish by 5 so I can do other things. I believe it tracking my habits, so if I have to do something everyday I keep a track of it because sometime I do get carried away but keeping a check on my habits keep me on track. It is important to switch the context, that is why the above point change in environment is important, it helps me disengage.

That is it really nothing much, I with Coronavirus (COVID-19) spreading in UK more and more organisations are adopting work from home culture and honestly it is not just something that can be implemented in 1 day. It requires a shift in how teams work together. I think companies will surely think about it now much more than before.

I also made a video on this topic: https://youtu.be/Chcj-ibGx04

I hope you enjoyed reading my thoughts on WFH. Thanks.
Enjoy.

So you have decided to learn Jira, great good choice. I can help. I was thinking of creating this page or blog or whatever you want to call it where I will list all the necessary resources to help your become a Jira expert.

How to use this page?

I will try to categorise my resources with tags and this page will have things in order starting from beginner level to advanced. So you may want to bookmark this page and come back here from time to time. Although my site is built on Drupal with new things updated automatically on the home page and there are separate sections for everything but this page can be your starting point.

Most of the resource as I mentioned before will be on this site with embedded videos so it will be easier to keep track of things.

Ready, good. Let us start.

There are primarily 2 types of skills

1. Jira user: You have to use Jira as a developer, tester, helpdesk agent. If your organisation is using Jira for non technical projects even then you can learn to use Jira. You could also be a project manager and I would treat them as users as well although they can do few additional things like managing their own projects.
2. Jira Administration: You already know how to use Jira but now wants to learn the Administration. This could be because you are expected to learn it for a new job or role or may be you are looking to start your career as a Jira admin or consultant.

We will start with of course the usage of the tool but majority of my resources will focus on making you an expert.

All the resources are created by me alone. I may from time to time give reference to external sites but you will find links to either my blogs or videos.

It will be free. Although I do have books and videos courses but I won't be promoting them or ask you to buy so be assured that I am trying to help here. I am doing this because first of all I like it, I like learning new things and keeping myself updated so I would also take this opportunity to learn and share it at the same time.

Ok how do I get started? - Beginner to Advanced

1. Go to Atlassian website and learn about various products. Yes this is very important step.
2. I know you are on this page because you want to learn Jira. So get yourself access to a Jira instance. On this site most of the resources are based on the Jira Server version, however wherever applicable I will mention if I use the cloud version.
3. Keep an eye on my blog, I write a lot about Atlassian tools and Jira.
4. To get updates from my channel you can subscribe to my newsletter.
5. Subscribe to my youtube channel. Again 90% of my videos are on Atlassian tools.
6. Subscribe to my Spotify Podcast, yes I write, make videos and also do podcasting. 90% of my content probably a bit more is around Atlassian. So the more information you can consume, the more you will learn.
7. The best up to date resource to learn any Atlassian tool is the official documentation and you should refer to it regularly and bookmark it.
8. Learn about various deployment options. This is important because you want to decide early whether the Jira you want to setup or manage is hosted by Atlassian called as Cloud or on premise version called Server which again has one more version called Data Center.

- Podcast: Learning Jira Administration on cloud vs server

9. Feature wise all deployment options have 90% of the things common but may be 70% depending upon how much you want to customise it but if you want to get a quick idea about how Jira looks like you can always do a 1 week evaluation of Jira on Atlassian Cloud and then decided later if you want to use it or not. Also the server version can be evaluated for at least a month. So long story short just sign up for the cloud evaluation version.

Ravi Sagar's Mock Tests Disclaimer: On my website you will find tests to validate your knowledge. Those tests don't contain any of the sample questions (or similar questions) that may come in official Atlassian certification tests. Apart from my blogs, videos and podcast, this test is just another form of learning and validate your knowledge. Please refer to this blog if you are preparing for the certification. If you want to learn Jira (no matter what your current level is) then refer to this ultimate guide to learning Jira and becoming an expert.

Can you contact me?

Of course, I am on all social sites and the best way to get further help is to comment to my posts like videos on YouTube. You can comment on my youtube videos directly or reply to my posts on twitter or on linkedin. If you use the contact form on this site, I may be able to respond soon but again I have my life as well and I can certainly not help you personally but I will try my best whenever I can. As I said earlier I like learning and sharing. Simple.

More to come. There will probably be hundreds of steps here. So hang on and check this page again from time to time.

I have been using ScriptRunner for Jira for many years but I never bothered to learn it properly. I don't even know groovy well, but I guess for doing Jira Administration you just need to know about programming and don't need to be a full fledged developer. So I started learning it properly and I thought of also sharing whatever I was learning and it might help others who are trying to learn ScriptRunner for Jira for doing wonderful things with their Jira instance.

Here is the link to my ScriptRunner for Jira playlist.

I recommend starting from the beginning. If you are a beginner and let me know if it was useful.

Enjoy and have fun.

I made my first youtube video for educational purpose in 2011, that was 8 years ago. I had a windows machine back then and I made quite lot of videos, mostly on Drupal. Those videos were really bad (when I look at them now), when I say bad I mean as compared to my current videos which are not great either. My audio was bad, I was not talking properly, the delivery was not great either although the content was useful. I stopped making videos for a long while because youtube was not a big thing yet in India at least 8 years ago. It was a good platform but nothing like right now. I had other priorities in life so I didn't bother much. Around 2 years ago I though I should restart creating videos. My objective was simple - I wanted to learn new things and I know from my experience that when you learn something with the intention to teach someone, it gives you even more reasons to learn something new.

Advantages
Creating a video tutorial has several advantages, apart from learning new things you learn how to speak properly, how to present, how to talk to a camera, how to organise your thoughts, how to convey your message with clarity and most important it gives a sense of satisfaction when you create something. Bonus advantage is that as a professional it is a good addition to your profile. If you want to tell the world you know something then creating videos is a great way.

So when I restarted creating videos I realised that doing something additional in your already busy life is not easy. So the videos I make now are made within limited time. I don't spend more than 1 hour (sometimes 30 mins) on my videos from thinking about the topic, recording and editing to finally uploading it. Today I thought I will probably share my workflow and the tools that I use. It might help someone and wanted to write a blog on some topic :)

Schedule
Before anything else you need to make sure you follow a schedule. Don't worry about creating a bad video. Just create something on a regular basis. I try to achieve 1 video per day. I use whatever resource I have available. If I don't have access to a computer I try to record something from a mobile but I try not to miss my schedule. It feel good and get you into a good habit.

Preparation
I don't really prepare much, I force myself to just decide a topic within few minutes and that is it really. I think it is good to push yourself and it works really well for me. Not all of my videos are on super informative topics but you never know a small thing, a simple video can be useful for thousands of people so I think don't worry too much about the preparation. Broadly I make videos on Atlassian tools, Drupal, Computer Science Engineering Topics and few miscellaneous tech stuff. I always have something to share on these topics or something to learn around them. If I have something to learn, something new then that is even better because I make a videos while learning it.

How I shoot?
For screen recording I use OBS, it is by far the best free tool. You should use it as well.
I use mostly my mobile or DSLR for video only content where I just talk showing my beautiful face and sexy voice.
I use professional mic which is very important more important than the video.

Editing software
I use HitFilm Express. It has a free version and works great. It has a learning curve but hey it is free and powerful. I considered spending money on Adobe tools but then I thought may be not, I will probably use that money for Beer. I don't do great editing, mostly I add an intro and end and my videos are one take. I keep it simple. I don't have time to add animations or making a video perfect. I keep it natural.

For mobile only videos I use Vlogit. It is free as well.

Publishing
I use Google slides for making thumnails. Works really well for me even for mobile.
I keep my video description in OneNote.

That is it really, quite simple workflow. My focus is to have informative get content out regularly. I hope these tips will help in case you are also looking to do the same thing. Don't hesitate reaching out to me. Here is a link to my Youtube channel: https://youtube.com/ravisagar1

Have fun.