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Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

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Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#21

Post by sonnyblarney »

Something that differentiates Slack from other apps, is that there should never be any need to manage data across corporate clusters.

Instead of a massive, complicated back-end, imagine if each Slack 'installation' (i.e. customer) had their own set of services, distinct from one another.

Even with 10K users each for the larger customer accounts, I'd imagine that 'customer backend' might not have be super complicated.

i.e. I wonder if there's an opportunity for systems such as these to 'scale horizontally' instead of vertically, whereby each customer has their own little set of services.

In this manner 'managing billions of messages' wouldn't seem so daunting, rather, no more daunting that some 3rd party running several thousand MS Outlook instances, one for each customer.

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#23

Post by kmavm »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #21

Something that differentiates Slack from other apps, is that there should never be any need to manage data across corporate clusters. Instead of a massive, complicated back-end, imagine if each Slack 'installation' (i.e. customer) had their own set of services, distinct from one another. Even with 10K users each for the larger customer accounts, I'd imagine that 'customer backend' might not have be super complicated.…

We decided early on to colocate most aspects of the back-end, in part because we anticipated shared channels[1], but also because provisioning even virtual hardware for each team would be prohibitively expensive: we have over 600,000 organizations in Slack today[2], too many to make hard-partitioning most resources economical.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/slack-brings-shared-channels-t... [2] https://sec.report/Document/0001628280-19-004786/

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#24

Post by kmavm »

jdorfman wrote: post #2

Hello HN! We’re really excited to share this with you all. If we’ve missed any key details, or if you’d like to add a new event to the timeline, email stackhistory@stackshare.io and we will update it asap. Have a great weekend!

Hi! We didn't do a great job writing about this at the time, but Slack's migration into HHVM took place in 2016. We've been gradually increasing the coverage of Hacklang (Facebook's gradually typed descendant of PHP) since then, and are now 100% Hacklang.

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#25

Post by msoad »

wlesieutre wrote: post #18

I wonder if they'll consider building the Mac app off of the iOS codebase with Catalyst instead of using the web codebase with Electron. RAM and battery abuse are the main complaints about their app and I'd think that would improve both of them.

Windows is big but I think it's worth it since they already have a team maintaining the Electron app and team managing the iOS app. They need to hire a few iOS engineers to prototype this idea and evaluate if it's something they can go with. I would defiantly appreciate a native app on my Mac.

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#26

Post by el_benhameen »

atombender wrote: post #16
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 Nevere…

Poor fellow. Maybe third time's the charm and he'll finally see some success.

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#27

Post by swrobel »

jdorfman wrote: post #2

Hello HN! We’re really excited to share this with you all. If we’ve missed any key details, or if you’d like to add a new event to the timeline, email stackhistory@stackshare.io and we will update it asap. Have a great weekend!

Would love to know why you guys think it's a good idea to have a login modal take over the screen out of nowhere after scrolling about 1/3 down the page. So user-hostile ️
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