Over the last few months, there have been a steady number of articles, tweets, etc. concerned about Atlassian’s commitment to continued investment in SourceTree. The apparent silence from our end hasn’t helped either. An update is long overdue.
Introducing myself
Many of you, who are followers of SourceTree, are used to seeing posts from Steve Streeting and Kieran Senior. So the most logical question is, who am I? My name is Michael Minns, and I joined the SourceTree team last October as a Team Lead.
I’ve been with Atlassian for a number of years. Prior to SourceTree, I spent my time working on cross-product Java libraries used in the integration of our products – JIRA, Stash, and Bamboo. One of the things I love about working at Atlassian is that we get to use the products we develop, every day. We get the same experience as our customers – an improvement for you means an improvement for us. It is most true in our developer tools team. So when the opportunity came to join the SourceTree team – it was a simple decision for me – not to mention the overlap with an abiding passion for .NET.
I’m excited to be working on a project that has such close contact with its customers. I love the passion you all show for SourceTree and your desire to see it improve continuously.
“Be the number one graphical Git client in the world”
The statement above is SourceTree’s BHAG a.k.a. our moonshot. While we know we are still quite far from it, I wanted to mention it to highlight our strong belief in the future of SourceTree.
While SourceTree has been loved here always at Atlassian, it is fair to say that the phenomenal growth in the number of users over the last year or so has surprised us greatly. Steve Streeting and Kieran Senior have done an incredible job of keeping SourceTree moving forward with new features and supporting our growing base of users, which has rocketed past 650,000 MAUs (monthly active users) in early 2015.
Maintaining the quality is not easy
Windows users of SourceTree are painfully aware of some of the quality and performance issues we’ve experienced since the 1.6 release and the introduction of the tree view back in October 2014. These are summarized in the (slightly notorious) issue – SRCTREEWIN-2093. We took our eyes off the ball and didn’t act quickly enough. The delay in getting the bugs fixed was compounded by the fact that the code base required major refactoring. We are currently working through the issues and while we still have a long way to go, the latest Windows release, v1.6.13, has turned a significant corner and put us back on the road to recovery.
We’re here for the long haul
It is true that Steve Streeting, SourceTree’s founding father, is no longer working directly on SourceTree. However, he is still here at Atlassian, to provide advice, opinion, guidance and that invaluable longer-term perspective to the team. Steve’s talent is a huge asset to Atlassian, and he is currently putting it to use by working on a super secret project that will be of great benefit to all Git and SourceTree users a bit further down the line.
In the meantime, SourceTree is receiving a lot of love from Atlassian. SourceTree is an integral part of our family of developer tools and will be receiving even more investment in the near future. With this renewed focus we will be able to keep moving forward – hiring new team members, adding features, improving integrations with other products and services, focusing more on the overall user experience and providing a stable and responsive application.
A huge thanks to the SourceTree community
We’re a product company and pride ourselves in building products you’ll love and help your team build better software. Your feedback helps us improve SourceTree, so keep reporting issues and potential improvements.
Be assured, we’re here for the long haul. We’re just getting started with SourceTree.