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How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

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Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#91

Post by ndneighbor »

udev4096 wrote: post #23

Why not use matrix instead?

I have been following Matrix development for sometime and I do like the direction where they are going at.

However, a lot of my time is trying to reach companies where they are and the majority of them are in Slack. I think there is a case to be made where more companies use Matrix over Discord for their community operations but I think we are seeing a trend of users willing to forego freedoms (as in speech) in exchange for services that are free (as in beer).

I think the challenge for protocol developers is to make sure that their client experience is top notch to win and keep those users, something that Mastodon faced vs. the now popular rise of Bluesky. The policy our company practices on whether to support a channel is: we build where our users are.

With that said, it's looking like a Teams integration is more likely so I guess we will be learning how to hook into there...

(Rip Spectrum chat)

Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#92

Post by defanor »

ndneighbor wrote: post #82
defanor wrote: post #27

> It gives us 50x better engagement than email and 8x better response times to customers. Does it mean that it forces the customers to send 50 messages instead of a single mail message? > However, developers hate email. Always feels awkward when there are general statements about the group you belong to, which are certainly false at least for you, and possibly for most others you know in that group. If anything, I wo…

Forgive me! Whenever I write internally or externally, it's usually a super long rambling piece and then we cut it down. The hardest part about writing for me making sure that everyone can have something to take away from it. I'll zoom out- Railway got its first users from a Twitter post from the founder asking people to try the product. The founder then sat in a Discord voice channel during the winter break just ans…

> So we did that for a bit much to the annoyance to developers. Then we started emailing them to see if they wanted to chat- I can't speak for you, but a lot of people in our book didn't reply.

This looks like an amusing misunderstanding in both directions: I did not check the linked previous blog post until now, and interpreted it as developers disliking to use email to contact you, but apparently what you mean is that you contact them, for no important reason. I would not just ignore such an email, but probably would treat it as spam, and this sounds like the kind of thing some people dislike email for.

Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#93

Post by jlarocco »

culi wrote: post #38
pinoy420 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to use discord at work

It would also cost companies a fraction of what Slack costs. And there's a thriving bot community for Discord as well I worked at a startup where our single biggest cost was the Slack bill. It's crazy to me what companies will go through to "seem professional"

Could be worse. I worked for a company that wouldn't pay for Slack, but mandated we use it.

Incredibly frustrating to search for something, see that people have discussed and answered it before, but not be able to read it.

Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#94

Post by andreif »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #66
throwup238 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Slack might be billed as a professional tool, but it also has one of the worst interfaces I’ve ever used, riddled with non-intuitive workflows Have you used Microsoft Teams?

I have, and I generally prefer it to Slack, unlike Slack, it (off the top of my head): - Has much richer message formatting and doesn't regularly do weird things to mess up the formatting as I'm composing a message. (Just this morning I was fighting Slack to try have nested bullet points not disappearing or de-indenting as I was composing a message). - Consistently marks messages as read without me having to click ch…

Do you enjoy the other parts of MS ecosystem?

Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#95

Post by vultour »

whstl wrote: post #51
defanor wrote: post #27

> It gives us 50x better engagement than email and 8x better response times to customers. Does it mean that it forces the customers to send 50 messages instead of a single mail message? > However, developers hate email. Always feels awkward when there are general statements about the group you belong to, which are certainly false at least for you, and possibly for most others you know in that group. If anything, I wo…

I'll offer a counterpoint: The one thing I like better about Slack over email is the lack of constant spam from random apps. Working in a company means that only 1% of my email is actually from humans. I must constantly add new filters, because even small companies today use dozens of SaaS products that are constantly fighting for my attention, and only a small fraction of those messages is actually useful for me. Sl…

That really depends on the company, mine has ~5k employees and the only spam I get is a daily "AI slop training" invitation from Microsoft.

Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#96

Post by andreif »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #86
culi wrote: post #22

I apologize if this is more of a response to the headline than the article content, but how does Slack, a professionally-oriented messaging app, not have syntax highlighting features for their markdown while Discord— a casual, gamer-oriented messaging app– does?

A few theories. - Tech debt, they can't easily add or change features anymore - Performance, rendering syntax highlighted markdown in messages is too expensive - Performance optimization, by not having syntax highlighting they encourage people to create snippets instead, which goes to different backends and lazily loaded clientside rendering pipelines to support larger files and syntax highlighting.

So I have to upload files to enable syntax highlighting. There is probably a reason but the users frustration is helping them to look for alternatives.

Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#97

Post by fhd2 »

cess11 wrote: post #88
fhd2 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love email. It's the exclusive way we communicate at our company, too. We almost use it like Slack, writing short messages, usually getting a response pretty immediately. For group discussions, we use plain old mailing lists (Topicbox from Fastmail currently). It's not perfect, for sure, but: 1. You can use a client of your choice. 2. You can filter in any way you like. 3. You're not stuck with any particular provi…

It's also easy to make backup copies. The worst part is that pretty much every popular client spews massive amounts of unnecessary HTML and CSS into the body.

Yeah, I personally gave up and embraced HTML email, so I can't really use some of the nerdier clients I like. Right now I'm pretty OK with Thunderbird - knowing that I _could_ switch any time I like is somehow good enough for me, it appears.

Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#98

Post by belter »

UltraSane wrote: post #85
throwup238 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Slack might be billed as a professional tool, but it also has one of the worst interfaces I’ve ever used, riddled with non-intuitive workflows Have you used Microsoft Teams?

I really don't get the hate for Teams. At least on Windows and Android it works well enough. One thing I find impressive is since I can't join my earbuds to my company PC I join a meeting on the PC and my phone so I can use my earbuds and microphone while watching video on my PC screen.

An app so broken that can tell you lost access to the Chat... WHILE...you are in a meeting hearing and seeing a visual presentation...Open bug for at least 6 years...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/in-my-...

Unable to pause screen during a presentation, one of the most basic features of a professional platform. A feature requested here by more than 2460 users, for at least the last five years:

https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/a5063e83-...

Microsoft is fast-food not a Michelin restaurant...

Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#99

Post by UltraSane »

belter wrote: post #98
UltraSane wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't get the hate for Teams. At least on Windows and Android it works well enough. One thing I find impressive is since I can't join my earbuds to my company PC I join a meeting on the PC and my phone so I can use my earbuds and microphone while watching video on my PC screen.

An app so broken that can tell you lost access to the Chat... WHILE...you are in a meeting hearing and seeing a visual presentation...Open bug for at least 6 years... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/in-my-... Unable to pause screen during a presentation, one of the most basic features of a professional platform. A feature requested here by more than 2460 users, for at least the last five years:…

the pause screen thing. Just use the screen snip program

Re: How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

#100

Post by scubbo »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #61
andai wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangential, but you might want to look into GTD, I've found it very helpful for handling stuff I know I'd forget otherwise. Here's a good intro https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15747703

I’ve never thought GTD is a good system for programmers. The last thing I want to do is interrupt some important piece of work because an incoming request will only take a couple of minutes.

That's entirely contrary to my understanding and implementation of GTD - which is to have daily "scans" of my inboxes to see what tasks have come in since the last scan, bucket them into the appropriate categories/lists/record-keeping systems, and then _close those inboxes_ until the next scan. If anything, GTD keeps me _more_ interruption-free, by strictly ringfencing the times that I am open to processing new task-requests.
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