Daily notes

I logged into one of my Jira Cloud instance to realise that I can enable the new interface which looks like Jira Server version. It was actually the case for many years but couple of years Atlassian changed the interface with sidebars on the left. People complained a lot and they didn't like the new interface. Especially those who were using Jira for years.

I think Atlassian listened to the feedback and took this really seriously and decided to bring back the old interface. It is not exactly the same but you won't miss Jira Server now.

I made a video on this topic if if you want to take a look: https://youtu.be/UZcGwty_uac

So today I came across a forum topic where there was a discussion about best YouTube channel or an online resource to learn about tools like Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket.

Atlassian is growing and people/organisation are adopting tools like Jira a lot more now but it is surprising that not many resources are available outside Atlassian Community where you can learn and discuss about it. However it is just a matter of time and things will change eventually. There are lot fo resources of the blogs and websites of various Atlassian vendors as well.

My objective is to fill this gap little bit. I am doing my part by writing a lot about it and making free videos on Atlassian tools. You can follow me using the links below if you want to learn and stay abreast with latest happening in Atlassian ecosystem.

Social

1. Blog: https://www.ravisagar.in
2. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravisagar/
3. Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/ravisagar
4. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ravisagar.in
5. Spotify Podcast: https://go.ravi.pro/spotify
6. Apple Podcast: https://go.ravi.pro/apple
7. Youtube: https://youtube.com/ravisagar1

Free Video courses

1. GetAnswers: https://go.ravi.pro/GetAnswers
2. Portfolio for Jira: https://go.ravi.pro/portfolio
3. Structure for Jira: https://go.ravi.pro/StructureJira
4. ScriptRunner for Jira: https://go.ravi.pro/ScriptRunnerJira
5. Google Apps Script tutorials: https://go.ravi.pro/GoogleAppsScript
6. JiraTips: https://go.ravi.pro/JiraTips

Jira books and Video courses (Available to buy)

1. Jira Quick Start Guide (Book): https://go.ravi.pro/JiraQuickStartGuide
2. Mastering Jira (Book): https://go.ravi.pro/masteringjira
3. Jira 7 Guide for Administrators and Developers (Video course): https://go.ravi.pro/JiraGuideAdmin
4. Jira 7 Essentials (Video course): https://go.ravi.pro/JiraEssentials

Recently I achieved the SAFe 4 Agilist certification after attending 2 days of training. The course is really good, I enjoyed those 2 days where we learned formally about various phases in SAFe implementation. I did work on some aspects of SAFe previously but I never did a formal training and that's why I was able to relate to things I did before. After those 2 days of training I did few days of preparation for the exam. The certification is achieve after clearing the exam which is I would say not the easy one. It is important that you study your notes and the material given to you during the course.

I am happy I achieved this certification. It will definitely help me a lot when I am working with organisations trying to solve problems when scaling up and adopting Agile and DevOps practices.

Few months ago I made one video on the topic of Why SAFe is needed: https://youtu.be/88PQkyTcgHM

I hope you enjoy it.

Have fun!

In August last year I had around 100 subscribers, till then I was making videos on several topics but after that I decided to make videos only on Atlassian tools. 6 months have passed and I have 761 subscribers and growing quite fast. I will come back to this note after some time when I cross million subscribes :)

Jokes apart (may be not) I never thought about the analytics like views and watch time. I make videos because I like making them. Although I am more into blogging or at least I was but making videos is just another format. I like keep a record of things. Making videos or writing about things I learn gives me a sense of satisfaction. I like to end my day with some task that brought a value. When I go to bed and think about my day there should be at least 1 valuable thing or little achievement that I can be proud of.

I quite often refer to my old blogs or videos to refresh my memory or relearn what I did long back. It is like my own little knowledge base.

Coming back to the analytics, yes I like when people comment and ask questions on my channel. I receive thank you note from many people almost every day. Not about my videos only but also by reading my blogs. If you want to know me start reading my blogs from the beginning and you will see how I evolved over the years. I think I like to spend lot of time solving problems mostly for myself but by sharing I think I can help others or connect with like minded people.

I have always been in an industry where my profession requires me to interact with people. I am not massively a people person but I have countless examples of people meeting me and telling me "Oh I read your blog it was great" and now a days people say "Your videos are great". I know my videos are not great, people are usually nice. I try to focus on content but I know I can always improve.

Anyways. If you are reading this blog then please subscribe to my channel. I am think I am slowly becoming a slave of YouTube algorithm :), not really but I will like that, here is my channel link: https://youtube.com/ravisagar1

I recently started doing podcasting also, yes why not. No actually I started podcasting 10 years ago but I didn't continue because of other priorities in life, but now things are much easier. I make podcasts usually from my mobile. Here are the links in case you want to listen to me :)

Spotify: https://go.ravi.pro/spotify
Apple: https://go.ravi.pro/apple

That's it for today. Enjoy.

Few weeks ago I started creating videos on Portfolio for Jira which is an agile roadmapping tool for Jira. I have already created quite a lot videos and will continue to focus on Portfolio for a while.

You can start taking the course immediately by clicking here.

You can watch the playlist here: https://go.ravi.pro/portfolio

Yes it is possible to pause now and I am late to the party.

You can pause a recording not a streaming. Make sure you are now using stream encoder in your recording options.

So don't wait just update to version 24 or later ;)

I made one video in later 2018 where I talked about SOAP vs REST. I did some preparation before making that video like I made a nice slide where I explained what is SOAP, what is REST and I tried to go through the differences. I made that video mainly to learn myself. Little did I know that the video will become really popular. Right now it is the most watched video on my channel.

You can watch that video here.

I am glad I made that video. Not only I think it was useful but it also gave me an idea and motivation to create more videos which I have been doing since then :)

In December TFL started running the new trains on the Reading Paddington route as part of the Elizabeth line and of course the Cross Rail project which is great. In January the passengers can also pay using the contact less not oyster though.

Yesterday I went to Waterloo and it costed me £25 from Burnham. I paid by just touching in and out at all the stations. I felt like I am traveling in the tube from Burnham to Paddington.

Overall I am happy and I am sure many people will be happy with this.

Just realising that this is my first post of 2020. I think it is a good time to reflect back on 2019 and plan things for 2020. I normally have a plan always with me on things that I want to do in near and long term but it is good to review it from time to time.

2019 highlights
Clearly 2019 was the year when I took YouTube seriously. I was able to maintain consistency and made hundreds of videos.

Also I invested time learning things that I never knew before and it is always a good feeling.

2020
Making videos is my habit now, I have been quite consistent lately, I am making a video everyday without fail but apart from making regular videos I will try to focus on the quality a bit more.

I will continue learning new things this year.

One thing which I was ignoring is my health. I think this year this would surely be my number priority. I have promised myself that I will be in great shape this year.

That is it really. Not making lot of plans for 2020 :)

Hi Ravi! I just read your article and it's awesome!

Thanks to letsencrypt.org I have installed ssl certificate on most of my sites. However after installing the certificate we also need to ensure that the traffic coming to http is redirected to https.

Use the following code in your vhost.conf file or where your apache configuration for the site is stored.

Today I was trying to install simplenews module on my site but I faced some errors related to entity updates after install it. I found these 2 commands to fix that.

First to check what updates are needed use this command.

drush updatedb:status --entity-updates

To actually fix it use the following

drush entity:updates

Now it should fix the problem. Enjoy :)

I checked my Spotify podcasters dashboard where I noticed a summary of my 2019. I started (restarted) podcasting earlier this year and made 18 episodes. I am quite happy with the outcome.

I have made literally hundreds of videos in 2019. I wrote a blog about the tools I use to make these videos and also shared my workflow. The quality of my videos is questionable though and definitely not great but that was my intention from the beginning that I wanted to make as many videos as I can without worrying about the quality. For close to 7-8 months I think I made a video everyday, which is quite good achievement I think :) Honestly it was not difficult, just share whatever you know already but making a video requires some effort.

First you have to figure out how to record yourself, the audio, screen and then you have to edit everything together. I have shared details in my other blog about all the tools but one thing which I figured out is the importance of a thumbnail, especially when you are starting from zero. Honestly I don't care about subscribers and views but it always feels good when many people watch your videos and give you feedback. It is also a skill which I never had and I have learned quite a lot. So I decided quite early to make at least a decent thumbnail in my videos. Of course I wouldn't mind million subscribers. Being an ex-designer (well you never retire from designing do you?) I was tempted to open my GIMP or CorelDraw and make a perfect thumbnail but I am a bit of a perfectionist which is horrible thing because then I would never be able to make something then. So intentionally I decided to do the whole process of video making from recording to uploading within 30 minutes (roughly)

Making thumbnail can consume lot of time and I decided to use few templates that I created in Google Slides. If you look at my templates I have some consistency which I think is important and having Google slides is a great option because you can paste your video's screenshot and then write text on top of it. I have few templates which I reuse for all the videos.

So this was my small recommendation. In case you want to make thumbnails quickly and easily then Google Slides could be a great option and it is free.

One of the best thing I like doing is nothing at all. When you wake up in the morning and don't worry about anything is one of my favourite feeling. People say that travelling is important to take a break for routine and rest but for some reason I find it quite difficult to relax when I am travelling. May be it is just me and I am not used to travelling a lot anymore.

For the past few days I am doing nothing. Literally nothing, apart from making videos for Youtube and working on my site ravisagar.in. Every year I make it a point to upgrade this site or do some work on it. I don't change the theme really but I work on upgrade the Drupal version. This time as well I did the same and made some changes to the site and learnt few more things on Drupal 8.

I always promise myself to be active on this site but I think I should write whenever I feel like and I won't force myself.

I have few more updates to do on this site. Mainly I will try to make it more information. Currently the site is mostly about me and my experiences but I will try to make it informative as well.

I will probably end this note now. Have fun. Bye.

This very lively statue was outside JP Morgan office at Blackfriars. Not sure who is this guy but looks cool.

In Jira you can create multiple custom fields of various types where you want to store crucial information related to you project. To avoid people from skipping those fields you can use a field permission scheme in Jira, its main job is to make a field required or hidden in the project.

Now making a field required makes sense but why would you hide a field using field permission scheme? Why can't we just not add the field?

The answer is very simple - reusing screens. Just like any other configuration in Jira, the screens can also be reused by various projects. Now as a good practice there should have been standards defined in your Jira instance for similar type of projects. When 2 or more projects are using the same screen with same set of custom fields then hiding few specific fields for selected projects can be done using field configuration scheme. You can also use custom field context but let us talk about it another day.

Coming back to the question of making a field required, when you use field configuration scheme, the field is required across the project irrespective of the issue type. That means whether you create a bug or a story in a project the field needs to have a value filled in. It can be annoying for the users.

If this suits you then use field configuration scheme. You may want to use this approach when you want to make sure there is a field across the project that needs to be filled in at the creation of the issue.

For example Summary and Issue Type fields are mandatory at issue creation.

However there will be many use cases where you do not want people to fill in the value in the field at the creation but you need that value to be filled in when the issue is progressed further in the workflow. May be you want to capture RCA when bug is closed or you need to make sure a justification is added when the issue is escalated. In such cases you need to use a workflow validator.

Now in Jira with the help of few apps like "Jira Miscellaneous Workflow Extensions" or "ScriptRunner for Jira" you can make a field required during a workflow transition by adding a workflow validator. If you already have these apps then great otherwise depending upon how much customisations you need to do in Jira, you need to evaluate whether you need to purchase additional apps or not.

I have been creating lot of videos on ScriptRunner for Jira, which is probably one of the most powerful add-on that organisations use to make the best out of their Jira instance. If you are a Jira Administrator than you cannot at any cost avoid it.

The problem is that many people think that learning ScriptRunner for Jira is difficult, in fact it is not at all difficult. Depending upon how much programming experience you already have you can do different things. Even if you have very little programming experience I feel you can still learn it. Using ScriptRunner you won't be developing full fledged applications within Jira (although you can) but most often you will be solving problems big or small to make Jira work for you and that is really important because you cannot install add-on for every other requirement that is not natively available in Jira. Writing small scripts here and there with the help of ScriptRunner will let you achieve those requirement.

Now I have been creating these videos on ScriptRunner and will continue doing so, here is the link to the course.
- Mastering ScriptRunner for Jira
- Mastering ScriptRunner for Jira Cloud

My videos are for absolute beginners and my objective is not to explain to you what Groovy language is and how Jira works but rather I want to focus on how to do small things in Jira using ScriptRunner and with the help of these fundamental concepts and you achieve lot many things.

Do you need to have prior programming experience?
Yes and No. If you want to use ScriptRunner for Jira then eventually you would have to write scripts to solve problems. There are lot of features in ScriptRunner that can be used without writing code. There are built in scripts and lot of workflow enhancements as well but to get the most out of it you need to write scripts in Groovy. The main thing that you need is the desire to learn, if you have previous programming experience then great you will not find Groovy hard. If you are new to programming then you can always learn it. I think Groovy is an easy language to learn. I also made videos on Groovy.

I hope you enjoy these videos. Have fun and let me know if you like them.

I have to admit that I am little late in upgrading to Jira 8. I didn't really have specific need for upgrading but I think now is the right time.

I will try to upgrade this weekend. Most of the scripts that I have should work at least the basic ones but it is still worth checking them. Also there are few new features that I am looking for to.

I just realised that I have hundreds of video tutorials on Jira and Atlassian tools. You can find most of my videos on this site if you click on the video link or you can go to my YouTube channel.

I don't feel I have so many videos but it feels good and I will continue making more.

Today I noticed that my podcast has started appearing on Google Podcast on its own. I didn't even submit it. Good.

Here is the link