Recently, I participated in the Forge Quest Hackathon by Atlassian—and it turned out to be exactly the kick I needed.
For a long time, I had let my Postman Doc app on the Atlassian Marketplace go stale. Life happens. Forge evolves. My app, once useful, had fallen behind—especially after major updates in the Atlassian Forge platform and the deprecation of older UI components.
But Forge Quest brought the spark back.
What is Forge Quest?
Forge Quest is Atlassian’s global hackathon for developers to build or upgrade apps using Forge, Atlassian’s modern cloud app development platform. The challenge? Build something cool using Forge, with bonus points if you ship it to the Marketplace.
For me, it wasn’t just about the challenge—it was the perfect opportunity to finally update my app and explore something I had been avoiding for a while: UI Kit 1.
The App: Postman Doc
The Postman Doc app helps teams embed API documentation directly into their Confluence pages, powered by Postman’s public docs. It was designed to reduce the back-and-forth between product managers, devs, and API consumers.
But since Forge and the Atlassian ecosystem are fast-evolving, my app had been flagged as deprecated due to lack of updates and use of outdated APIs.
Learning UI Kit 1
UI Kit 1 is the newer, more structured, and opinionated UI library for Forge. It offers:
- Better layout and design consistency across Atlassian products.
- Stronger support for accessibility.
- Components like
Form,TextField,ModalDialog,Select, andTablethat feel native inside Confluence and Jira.
Before the hackathon, I had mostly stuck with the older UI Kit or used custom HTML rendering in Forge. But Forge Quest nudged me to modernize.
What I learned:
- Migrating to UI Kit 1 wasn’t as daunting as I thought.
- It dramatically improved the UX of my app. Components like
DynamicTableandModalDialoghelped me clean up messy interfaces. - Forms became easier to validate and hook into Forge’s function backend.
What I Built
For the hackathon, I:
- Refactored the core UI of the app to use UI Kit 1.
- Added new features like searchable Postman collections, and smart error handling using
ModalDialog. - Improved the layout and responsiveness across Confluence screen sizes.
- Brought the app back to life on the Atlassian Marketplace 🎉
Final Thoughts
Forge Quest wasn’t just a hackathon for me—it was a nudge to learn, refactor, and relaunch. It reminded me how much value a well-timed community event can bring to indie developers like myself.
If you're someone who has old Forge apps gathering dust, or just want to explore Forge’s latest capabilities, I’d highly recommend jumping into the next Forge Quest or checking out the Forge developer documentation.
You might just find yourself shipping something you thought was long gone.
Check out the app: Postman Doc on Atlassian Marketplace
Try Forge: https://developer.atlassian.com/platform/forge/
Join the hackathon (if it’s still live): https://forgequest.devpost.com/
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