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Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

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Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#11

Post by faitswulff »

throwaway619 wrote: post #8
dom96 wrote: post #5

What's interesting is that Slack (the company) was founded in 2009 and yet the initial release of Slack was in 2013. That's 4 years of development, that seems like quite a long time.

Slack: They first built a game, it didn't do well, so they pivoted to focus on the message system they built for the game. Flickr: They first built a game, it didn't do well, so they pivoted to focus on the image hosting they built for the game. Games are hard.

Aren't there other companies that started out as games companies? I mean, it seems obvious, but Discord started out from the wreckage of a videogame company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discord_(software)

I was sure there were more examples, though.

Games are hard.

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#12

Post by arafalov »

sappapp wrote: post #10

Considering how experienced Slack appeared to be with Elasticsearch by 2017, why did they choose Solr for search?

They talked about it at a recent Solr conference Activate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ336PTZfhU (Rebuilding Message Search at Slack - Josh Wills & John Gallagher, Slack )

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#14

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

faitswulff wrote: post #11
throwaway619 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack: They first built a game, it didn't do well, so they pivoted to focus on the message system they built for the game. Flickr: They first built a game, it didn't do well, so they pivoted to focus on the image hosting they built for the game. Games are hard.

Aren't there other companies that started out as games companies? I mean, it seems obvious, but Discord started out from the wreckage of a videogame company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discord_(software) I was sure there were more examples, though. Games are hard.

Games require all of the latest technology and require maximum compatibility across all platforms.

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#15

Post by praneshp »

throwaway619 wrote: post #8
dom96 wrote: post #5

What's interesting is that Slack (the company) was founded in 2009 and yet the initial release of Slack was in 2013. That's 4 years of development, that seems like quite a long time.

Slack: They first built a game, it didn't do well, so they pivoted to focus on the message system they built for the game. Flickr: They first built a game, it didn't do well, so they pivoted to focus on the image hosting they built for the game. Games are hard.

Next time Stewart Butterfield co-founds a games company, it'll be one to watch out for.

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#16

Post by atombender »

dom96 wrote: post #5

What's interesting is that Slack (the company) was founded in 2009 and yet the initial release of Slack was in 2013. That's 4 years of development, that seems like quite a long time.

Slack started out as an internal chat tool by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield's Tiny Speck, which was trying to launch the game Glitch. When Glitch failed, they spun out Slack as a new company (or they renamed the company, not sure).

This is almost the exact thing that happened with Butterfield's first venture, Flickr, which was built on a web platform they wrote for a multiplayer online game called Game Neverending (which is why Flickr URLs have/had "gne" in their URLs).

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#17

Post by inputcoffee »

This is really interesting.

I would love to see something like this for other successful companies.

Too often, we see the tech stacks of famous firms, but not the stacks that preceded them.

It would be very interesting to note if, say, 80% of unicorns started their life as RoR, or PHP projects. It tells you one of two things:

1. Which frameworks were popular n years ago (where n is the average time it takes from launch to unicorn)

2. Which framework actually helps you get an MVP off the ground

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#19

Post by inputcoffee »

vincentmarle wrote: post #4

I’ve always admired Slack’s pragmatic choice for LAMP, despite the amount of slack it gets (pun intended). Despite its reputation, it still has an amazing community, ecosystem, and tooling to get shit done. I’m currently working with Flask/Postgres and it’s simply lacking when you need to scale it (in terms of performance/team size/code size) and there’s not great tooling to take it to the next level. Can’t wait to g…

I admit, it really makes you think about iterations and MVP in a new way.

I am surprised you said you found flask lacking though, because I would have thought they were similar. Can you say more about what you found to be lacking in terms of performance/team, size/code and tooling?

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#20

Post by throwaway619 »

faitswulff wrote: post #11
throwaway619 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack: They first built a game, it didn't do well, so they pivoted to focus on the message system they built for the game. Flickr: They first built a game, it didn't do well, so they pivoted to focus on the image hosting they built for the game. Games are hard.

Aren't there other companies that started out as games companies? I mean, it seems obvious, but Discord started out from the wreckage of a videogame company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discord_(software) I was sure there were more examples, though. Games are hard.

Yeah, absolutely. Butterfield was both Slack and Flickr.
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