I've used both, and I can only imagine your complaints about JIRA's UI are due to how it's been configured for your use.
The out of the box user experience is the best I've seen for a web application. A robust yet easy to use 'search' feature is at the heart of many things, like the scrum and kanban boards, as well as widgets that can be put on your own personalize dashboard. You get a nice visual designer for setting up workflows, and you can easily create new fields for issue types and have workflow depend on those fields.
I also find Stash to be well thought out and easy to use if your use-case is a pull-request workflow tied to JIRA. Sometimes it's not intuitive how to navigate around if you're just trying to view source, but that's not the selling point. If you're trying to navigate source history, use your local source control client, that's what it's built for.
My wife (currently asleep) and I have 3 children, and she's a .Net developer. I'm a Java dev. Every now and then we'll have discussions about various tech. We juggle care of the children between us.
I have a young female coworker who has just had her first child. She a Java dev, and she has the respect of her fellow devs and management.
Work life is balanced and family oriented here in the Midwest. Women are just as productive as men (and many are more so) and can serve in the same roles.
I write software for a living, and I found this comment to be dead on:
Trying not to be harsh, but this guy is obviously clueless - built his own game engine - maybe he should've started by wiring together his own circuit boards and then building an OS.
He wrote his own game engine because he had always wanted to is the obvious reason. He's a deluded fool for thinking he could do so in a couple months. It should have been a side project while still gainfully employed somewhere. Hard to do with two kids at home.
Which is why I can't fathom how a dude with a loving wife and two young kids quits his job and gambles their savings away. I've seen it happen before, but it was 'honest' gambling at a casino and it ended in divorce and general unhappiness. Maybe it's a form of mid-life crisis?
For me it all comes down to class size. If you are in a philosophy class with more than 15 students, how can it be said that one is having consistent and meaningful 2 way interaction with the other students and the teacher? It's simply not possible.
To the prof's who think lecturing to a class of >15 students is teaching them in a way that is different from what the students can get thru video, I say you're fooling yourselves. And you know this to be true.
What's beautiful about where this is headed is a) it's inevitable, and b) it will lead to a better education experience. How can it not be of benefit if the 100-level mundane subject matter is handled via video (with perhaps a teacher being available for questions and tutoring), and have the higher level courses be of smaller class size with mostly in-person teaching? We could probably prune some of the teaching staff and still deliver a better experience.
I agree that Iowa would be a good place for third party candidates to make a run, but the problem they have is visibility. There's no national visibility, and there's no local coverage. We have strong local media though, and I would actually call them balanced, so I've no idea why the visibility is lacking.
I grew up in L.A., came to Iowa for college and stayed. Am now in my late 30's. Was not affiliated with any party when I caucused for Obama the first go 'round.
Iowa is an interesting political crossroads for the nation. We have a large percentage of the population above 65 - 15% (http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-09.pdf) - and still rural - 36% as of 2010 (http://www.iowadatacenter.org/quickfacts). We are somewhat socially liberal - gay rights are making headway here - and fiscally conservative - our state sales tax is 6%.
Our racial makeup is predominantly caucasian, but we have been welcoming minorities and they are on the increase. Hispanic, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Serbians, Chinese, Ethiopians, etc continue to migrate here and are well represented at my children's school.
Where am I going with this? Iowans as a whole are hardworking people who are very giving of their time and want what's best for the country. We are accepting of others opinions and able to hold rational political discussions. And I think most of us are sick of gridlock in Washington and can see through the political BS (for example, all the posturing during the last round of federal budgeting). The older registered Republicans I've talked with over the last couple of years have told me they can see that Obama has been trying to work with Republican politicians, and it's not his fault things aren't getting done. That's why we re-elected him.
I think Iowa does a good job of being at the center of the U.S., both geographically and politically.
The out of the box user experience is the best I've seen for a web application. A robust yet easy to use 'search' feature is at the heart of many things, like the scrum and kanban boards, as well as widgets that can be put on your own personalize dashboard. You get a nice visual designer for setting up workflows, and you can easily create new fields for issue types and have workflow depend on those fields.
I also find Stash to be well thought out and easy to use if your use-case is a pull-request workflow tied to JIRA. Sometimes it's not intuitive how to navigate around if you're just trying to view source, but that's not the selling point. If you're trying to navigate source history, use your local source control client, that's what it's built for.