Last week's Atlassian Summit in San Francisco lived up to its promise to be awesome, and then some. It was by far the most positively-charged trade event I've ever been to.

There were enough visitors to keep ALM Works' five-strong delegation busy the whole time the exhibition floor was open.

And food, lots of food

On behalf of the away team, I'd like to shout out a huge thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth at the Summit and made our visit to San Francisco totally awesome.

It was great to chat with you all and hear about how you're using Atlassian products, and a real pleasure to introduce you to our JIRA plugins.

Equally fantastic was speaking with those of you who are already using our JIRA plugins. A separate thanks goes out to you for all your excellent feedback and ideas.

Exciting new development announced at Summit

If you haven't already subscribed for updates on development of JIRA Cross, the upcoming plugin from ALM Works that will enable you to synchronize multiple JIRA instances, now is a good time to do so.

The private beta is earmarked for release by the end of this year. Your feedback and feature requests at this stage stand a good chance of making their way to the first stable release in early 2014!

The purple rubber thing

We had plenty of questions at the Summit and even a few emails afterwards from people asking us what the mysterious purple rubber thing we put in their tote bag is.

The mysterious purple rubber thing in your tote bag

It's a Quikoin, a rubber coin purse that was first made popular as a branded souvenir item in America way back in the 1950's. The Quikoin has recently made something of a comeback as a novelty item and has found many alternative uses as a holder for all sorts of small items.

Stay tuned for another blog post next week, where we'll be announcing the winners of our awesome asteroid-shooting competition, and explaining the mysterious space thing on our giveaway t-shirts.

How was your Summit? We'd love to hear from you in the comments below, or on our Facebook page.