Dev Bargain of the Year

If you're like me you appreciate great development tools. Recently two of my favourite tools have become a lot more affordable.
The two tools are Confluence and Jira, both produced by Oz based Atlassian.

Confluence is an enterprise wiki application and I use this for all my note taking and documentation tasks.
This includes documents I need to send to people as Confluence will output to both pdf and word rather well.
Some of the great features of Confluence include: Spaces, xml backup and restore, funky macros.
My favourite feature is really that it is fast to create documents, you spend more time on the content and less on the formatting (e.g. the opposite of word).


Jira is another enterprise tool for bugtracking and can be used also to manage your work tasks and the tasks of others.
I use this to manage my development projects and delegate work out to the developers.
My favourite parts of Jira are the combination of speed and flexibility which leads to being able to manage project iterations with relative ease. It's fairly simple to manage 1000 tasks and bugs at a time by grouping them into projects, components and versions.

I spend nearly all day in one or other of these tools so can heartily recommend them as brilliant products, I just wish I could earn commission on recommending them '-)

Both products have new starter licenses enabling small teams to use these awesome products without having to find hundreds of dollars from their dev budgets, check them out!