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How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers

blog.railway.com

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

#5

Post by ndneighbor »

anotherhue wrote: post #3

I wanted this to be an auto generated stack overflow from slack lurking.

Technically with the data flow we have, that is now possible :think:

Hypothesizing aside, there are some interesting options out there like Tightknit and (for Discord) AnswerOverflow. I still think that Slack makes it way too hard to spin up and start up a community- I think there are many Slacks like the CNCF's one that would be nice as a browsable index of content.

As such, Railway's been investing in our own forums for this reason http://help.railway.com/ because we've noticed the decline of forum culture - and we want to bring it back. (Async, well thought out responses)

Maybe this is the next step of that integration!

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

#6

Post by lbotos »

ndneighbor wrote: post #4

Oh shoot, double surprise, and now from someone who isn't my co-worker who posted this. Developer of the feature here, happy to chat through details of the implementation and general developer GTM watercooler advice for those who are building for developers.

How many folks do you have to support your slack channels? I'm counting 4-5 support engineers based on your about page?

What are your SLOs for messages?

How are you managing missed SLOs?

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

#7

Post by ndneighbor »

lbotos wrote: post #6
ndneighbor wrote: post #4

Oh shoot, double surprise, and now from someone who isn't my co-worker who posted this. Developer of the feature here, happy to chat through details of the implementation and general developer GTM watercooler advice for those who are building for developers.

How many folks do you have to support your slack channels? I'm counting 4-5 support engineers based on your about page? What are your SLOs for messages? How are you managing missed SLOs?

Excellent questions!

Railway has three support engineers who work on tooling + myself if you count me. (I have been more focused on customer migrations and classical sales as of late.)

One thing that I think we left out of the blog post which would have been helpful context is in our support tool, we have a queue of emails, Discord threads, forum posts, tickets, and Slack threads. Depending on the customer plan, we have an SLO assigned to the conversation. Enterprise people get a response in 1 hour, Pro in 24, and Hobby is best effort (usually 2-3 days at worst).

If we hit any of those timelines, the support on-call (a rotating person who is on the operations/GTM side of the house we call logistics) will get a page on PagerDuty. If the page is missed, it escalates up. We do a on-call rotation for support namely to make sure that we build the empathy for our customers for everyone at Railway while also testing if we built good tools that people know how to use. It's one thing to build something for yourself, a whole other thing to build for others.

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

#8

Post by lbotos »

ndneighbor wrote: post #7
lbotos wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many folks do you have to support your slack channels? I'm counting 4-5 support engineers based on your about page? What are your SLOs for messages? How are you managing missed SLOs?

Excellent questions! Railway has three support engineers who work on tooling + myself if you count me. (I have been more focused on customer migrations and classical sales as of late.) One thing that I think we left out of the blog post which would have been helpful context is in our support tool, we have a queue of emails, Discord threads, forum posts, tickets, and Slack threads. Depending on the customer plan, we h…

ah -- so they aren't "working in slack" that's just how/where the users interface.

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

#9

Post by decasia »

It's a cool idea that the end users can chat easily with the teams who build the product. (If I got that right, I think that's part of what is offered here.) Where I work, we have several layers in between engineering and the end users and ... while there's a lot to be said for increasing focus and reducing distractions, I think it's also nice to have the unfiltered contact sometimes.
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