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Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

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Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#481

Post by spudlyo »

sumedh wrote: post #435
alienreborn wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every engineer I met dislikes Confluence. Engineers who write most of the documentation don't like using Confluence which lead to out dated, subpar and incomplete documentation. In my org, I noticed this and created a github repo to push documentation in Markdown. I created initial version of docs and now every engineer in our team uses it because they know markdown, appreciate version controlled docs and can use wha…

> Confluence which lead to out dated, subpar and incomplete documentation. How exactly is it Confluence's fault if your team does not update the docs?

Confluence's editor is truly awful. I've spent 15 minutes just trying to remove superfluous newlines -- it's maddening. If you do something like {{fsck}} to create a bit of monospace text, it's totally unclear if there is a space after the text, or there isn't, due to the way the reverse video section is larger than the actual text. God help you if you accidentally backspace into the monospace section, everything you type after that is monospace. It's extremely frustrating.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that many folks when faced with the prospect of updating a document using the Confluence editor will instead just find something less terrible to do.

I often write my entire document first using the old style Confluence markdown, and when done I import it into a new Confluence page. You can't take an existing document and convert into markdown, but if you are the only person working on the document this is a workable approach.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#482

Post by blazespin »

ironjunkie wrote: post #165

When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again. Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it…

I'll take this over open offices, at least you can tune it out.

Search is pretty good too

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#483

Post by jen729w »

denimnerd wrote: post #463
tigershark wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard the same luring song for the last 20 or so years. If Linux works for you then enjoy it. Don’t even try to suggest that Linux is easier than Mac OS X because I don’t like liars.

it's easier for development. os x sucks, I use it to surf the web on my ouch. my real dev machine is in my office with linux

It "sucks", really? You don't think that might be a bit of an overstatement?

You may not prefer it, but it objectively does not "suck".

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#484

Post by [deleted] »

daveheq wrote: post #471

Ugh, so how do Jira tickets related Bitbucket commits get automatically hyperlinked by ID? I guess they don't. Slack is unfortunately thought by some people I work with as a replacement for email... When it's almost impossible to discuss certain things in a chat app, and it's search is just not as good, and it's organizing messages almost non-existent.

[deleted]

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#485

Post by tabbott »

Eridrus wrote: post #474
tabbott wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because just about every technical team needs the ability to do some sort of real-time communication, and Slack's UI is obviously better polished than the products that predate it (HipChat/IRC/etc). If you're looking for a product built by top MIT engineers who spent years thinking about how to make chat actually productive, check out Zulip. I'm one of those MIT engineers, and I agree that Slack is a huge waste of ti…

I didn't get why everyone was getting hyped over a product without threads when they were the most useful part of Flowdock, so I'm glad you're trying to think about it further. But the flat thread model is still limited, particularly for complicated topics even a thread starts having the same problem as a channel where there is too much going on; have you thought about tree-structured threads, or some way of branchin…

We've thought about a tree-based model, but our current thinking is that a feature of that form would add a lot of UI complexity, for fairly limited benefit. One of the key things we'd lose with a tree-based model is the ability for someone catching up on a conversation to efficiently read it without a lot of jumping around between different views (or having to read a tree, rather than a linear history).

With Zulip's existing model, you can always fork off a side discussion by just starting a new topic, if appropriate adding links in one or both directions (and people pretty naturally do that when it makes sense to). Some Zulip users are fans of a convention to name a topic "original_topic.d" for a "digression" off a topic, but I think it's a much better approach to choose a topic that more directly suggests what the forked conversation is about.

(And I agree search is really important! If you're having lots of high-value conversations in a tool, it needs to be easy to find them later. Zulip's powerful full-text search has been praised as a lot better than Slack's since our very first prototype version of it. I think a big part of the reason is that the threads provide the context to make it easy to find the rest of a conversation. But we're always working on making it better).

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#486

Post by zacsme »

ironjunkie wrote: post #165

When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again. Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it…

At my job we use Slack to track pull requests for review, to monitor alerts for services, to track releases for deployments. Of course we also use it for private team chats. Some of the non-technical people have other bots they use too. Slack is much more than chat.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#487

Post by tabbott »

AntonyGarand wrote: post #479
tabbott wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I lead the Zulip project, one of the main open source alternatives to Slack.) The writing's been on the wall for HipChat for a long time; e.g. the user experience has been stagnant for many years (e.g. they never added emoji reactions). And even back in 2013, every HipChat customer I've encountered was unhappy or at best unenthusiastic about the product. So we've seen plenty of folks migrate from HipChat to Zulip. I…

To be fair, there are tons of very low severity vulnerabilities disclosed on HackerOne and this does not mean the application is vulnerable. Slack is definetly not vulnerable because it is written in php and you can pollute an iframe on their career website. Having such a program in place is actually good for the application security as it does get audited by tons of hackers thanks to the monetary rewards.

I agree it's theoretically possible to write a secure project in PHP, but it's very difficult, especially if you're hiring people like crazy.

If you divide the amount they've paid out in bounties by the number of bounties paid, and compare with their bounty tier rules, it's clear that a lot of the vulnerabilities that were reported in Slack are relatively severe.

(And I agree bug bounty programs are great; we also use HackerOne)

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#488

Post by inetknght »

capkutay wrote: post #373
ironjunkie wrote: post #165

When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again. Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it…

Those aren't slack problems, those are people problems. I can just as easily point to email threads that are incoherent and hard to follow. I can also point to meetings with no agenda that waste everyones time but give the appearance of 'managing' or team building. When used properly (not lazily), Slack is a great place to organize communication between teams. At worst its Skype with a way better UI...what's wrong wi…

Better than "Skype with a way better UI".

* it has a history I can actually search. Skype used to have this, but removed it when they rewrote it in Electron. !@#$ you to whoever at Microsoft decided to get rid of that; I used chat history search every day as part of my workflow.

* it has an API/plugin ecosystem. Admittedly, that's a walled garden so it's a double-edged sword. But for businesses that's awesome. Skype used to have an API but that's been deprecated. Conjecture: from abuse?

* it has security. I can log on to a private Slack and know that the people in there belong there. I can search for people on Slack and know that I'm communicating with who I intended to communicate. On Skype, you search for your coworker by typing in their name and you end up finding some other person instead. Hope you didn't just reveal corporate secrets to China.

Slack doesn't come without its own set of gripes, for sure. Let me enumerate some of them:

* Information density isn't configurable. I want a teeny tiny font. It's better than what Skype has become but still not as configurable as chat clients from the 90's

* Resource hog. Seriously, we've gone so far backwards it's appalling. Chat clients from the 90s didn't need anywhere near as much memory or CPU as Electron does and they were just as functional (sans audio/video/link preview).

I'm sure there's others but I'm tired

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#490

Post by lovich »

philwelch wrote: post #340
pm90 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a little too harsh. Not everyone is good at expressing themselves through an email chain; doesn't mean they're illiterate though.

Not everyone is good at expressing themselves in a real time conversation, either. Any medium of conversation excludes people who aren't good at that medium. But if you have to choose a medium of conversation, are you better off choosing one that excludes introverts, non-native speakers, and people who aren't loud and obnoxious enough to command the room? Or would you rather exclude people who lack the patience or in…

That's kind of a false dichotomy you've got going there. Introverts and non native speakers are all slow deep thinkers who need a thinkers medium to communicate, which is slow by your definition. Everyone using a quick communication medium is a moron though right? I assume that's what you meant by people who lack intellectual ability.

They are just different mediums. Long form is better for getting across new ideas that have to be explained for the first time, but a medium like emoji allows for incredibly dense communication with single glyphs once the meaning has been established

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