While working from home is the new normal, communicating and collaborating virtually hasn't become any easier. And for developers, being productive while at home has its own set of challenges (we're thinking of things like figuring out how to pair program over Zoom or how to make do with only a single monitor). In times like this, our engineering team has been relying on one short-cut towards productivity: the Bitbucket Cloud bot for Slack.

We're happy to announce that on September 15th, 2020, we will begin gradually enabling a new traffic acceleration improvement for all Bitbucket Cloud users (Free, Standard, and Premium) when accessing Bitbucket.org for Web- or Git-based (ssh/https) operations. This new improvement leverages AWS Global Accelerator to route traffic to and from Bitbucket Cloud via 83 Points of Presence in 73 cities across 38 countries, potentially dramatically speeding up transaction times.

Today Bitbucket is releasing a new labs feature, "Pending Merges", which allows for automatic merging of pull requests when builds pass. This means no more continually checking back in on your pull request, just waiting and waiting for your builds to pass before you can finally merge it. You will no longer be forced to begrudgingly fix that one-character whitespace typo in your comment that you really should fix, but that means you're in for another 30-60 minutes of watching your builds.

High productivity. Low turnover. Satisfied workers. Less stress. A larger talent pool. Fewer office expenses. ADA compliance. And better work-life balance. When you list the benefits of remote work, there’s a lot to love – for both businesses and the people they employ – which is a huge reason why more and more companies are starting to embrace a remote workforce.

When the entire company is working from home, pair programming is not only possible but even more valuable. If you were practicing it face to face, why not continue remote? If you weren’t, why not try? My team did a series of remote pair programming sessions in during the last month or so, and I want to share a few tips from that experience. If you’ve never tried pair programming before, here’s a good primer.

Cloud is no longer a differentiator – it’s a strategic requirement for long-term success. So says Forrester’s Benchmark Your Enterprise Cloud Adoption report, and so say our customers, 90 percent of whom choose our cloud products over hosting Server or Data Center versions on-premise (on-prem). Ten years ago, moving to the cloud was about staying ahead of the curve – no longer.

This blog is part of our series on how to use Atlassian features, automations, and integrations to take time back to ship better code, faster. Click here for the full list of 12+ new features or follow us on Twitter to stay up-to-date! Picture this: you've landed in a Development team that practices DevOps religiously (or maybe you're even leading one!). But despite spending hours integrating your tools and reading your edition of the Phoenix Project, you still feel like there's something missing.