Today`s guest of Jira for the People blog is Rachel Wright! If you are (or planning to be) a Jira administrator, you`ve for sure encountered content she made. She helped many people develop best practices of using Atlassian tools and there`s a lot of professional materials she provides. But her personal side is even more inspiring. She chose the life of a nomad.

Rachel lives in America, she wrote Jira Strategy Admin Workbook and is a founder of Industry Templates, LLC. She`s also a speaker, Atlassian Community Leader and author of courses for fresh and advanced Jira admins. Her Jira adventure started in 2011. Two years later she became an administrator, and in 2016 she`s got her first Jira certification (that was the year when Atlassian released such opportunity).

Into the known…

Apart from teaching basic and advanced functions, showing use cases and best practices, Rachel bewares of the Jira swamp. With a little help of automation, templates and… assertiveness one is able to build and keep clean and well-ordered Jira environment. She advices not only what to do but also what NOT to do, which is often more important.

I`ve inherited the worst application you can think of. Everything that could be done wrong was wrong. I was learning, first by making the same mistakes and then by fixing them. I started to write down all the information about why some patterns are wrong, why and how we should fix it. And I knew that I couldn`t be the only person who inherited a terrible configuration.

That was the beginning of a book, which now can save a lot of time and effort of many Jira admins.

…and unknown

As you can see Rachel loves order, methodology and reusable solutions. And that`s where things start to get more interesting. While Rachel, on one hand, sticks to what is known, at the other she chose the life of a nomad. She`s a full time traveler.

Once, my partner and I, we thought that it would be nice to live somewhere else. But we couldn`t decide where. We have even took a couple of trips to another states to check if we like it there, but we still just couldn`t decide. So we said “Hey, what`s the next best thing to do? Let`s get an RV, explore the States and when we find a place that we like, we`re hopefully gonna stay there”.

Now they`re living in RV for 7 years, changing place every three months (but sometimes also once a week) and enjoying the life on a road. And only thing Rachel actually misses is… bubble bath. She doesn`t consider such lifestyle as a courage, but I`m sure it deserves at least some of it.

What`s next

Rachel`s just launched the Jira: Advanced Administration course and she just finished her next course Jira Service Management Administration which will launch soon. While she has unlimited ideas on everithing which is Atlassian-connected, she would also love to write a book about living in RV. And you, the Jira People, be sure to check Rachel`s content.

– Jira Strategy Admin Workbook
– Industry Templates, LLC
– Jira: Basic Administration course
– Jira: Advanced Administration course