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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

#101

Post by culi »

jlarocco wrote: post #93
culi wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yeah that's a nightmare! There are slack alternatives that have unlimited messaging history in the free tier!

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

#102

Post by belter »

UltraSane wrote: post #99
belter wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, we are talking about pausing or providing a smooth transition to another page. Essential features of a professional presentation. Features present for ever and ever in GotoMeeting, Zoom and Webex...

https://youtu.be/I-xN3SdGr7k

https://youtu.be/PfXymiyENvI

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

#103

Post by steve_adams_86 »

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…

When I see Slack as a support channel I almost certainly won't use the support, and I'm less likely to use the product.

At least I can organize and search emails by default, and it's relatively private.

It's annoying having to anonymize my issues for my employer so I can publicly request support.

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

#104

Post by culi »

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.

> Tech debt, they can't easily add or change features anymore

It's this. I've worked on Slack applications and you can clearly see why they might struggle to implement this given the data structure of their messages. Their brand of markup is also quirky and it might be difficult to add this feature in a backwards compatible way

Snippets was added much later and part of me feels like the demand for syntax highlighting was exactly why they added snippets. It's also a scapegoat for them not adding syntax highlighting to regular messaging

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

#105

Post by psyclobe »

snowe2010 wrote: post #45
agnivade wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious to know what other alternatives have you found better.

Zulip is vastly better for people who are willing to learn an interface. But it’s not really very “pretty”

Hah, its 'good enough', but really has some bizarre ui flows that make things so very, very confusing...

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

#106

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#107

Post by [deleted] »

phailhaus wrote: post #84
ThinkBeat wrote: post #47

> However, developers hate emai I prefer email. Email is asynchronous, It does not interrupt my flow or my presentations, I can decide when I spend tine responding. Then I can fully focus on the emails and type the response they merit. Of course you have the person sending you an email and 30s later they tap you on the shoulder to ask if you got that email.

I Slack is interrupting your presentations, that's on you. You can mute the bell, you can even silence the popups. I've done both and my productivity is way up, now the only notification indicator is the badge.

[deleted]

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

#108

Post by tabbott »

psyclobe wrote: post #105
snowe2010 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zulip is vastly better for people who are willing to learn an interface. But it’s not really very “pretty”

Hah, its 'good enough', but really has some bizarre ui flows that make things so very, very confusing...

Hi! It'd be a huge help if you can stop by chat.zulip.org and share in #feedback what you find bizarre. Maybe we can fix them for you :)

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

#109

Post by NotAnOtter »

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…

> However, developers hate email.

My perspective is every form of communication bears certain unspoken rules / implications.

* Email - This is a serious thought out discussion

* Slack / Similar in a shared channel - This is office-formal, you should be professional but can joke around. Similar to how you would talk to an equal or your manager in person

* Slack / similar in DM - This is a rapid "Quick question" forum where you just need some links or quick thoughts. Nothing here is very serious

* Phone call - This is informal, rapid discussion for time sensitive issues. I'm calling you so that I don't have to page you.

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

#110

Post by cess11 »

fhd2 wrote: post #97
cess11 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At work we use Thunderbird for regular communication but I sometimes have to dig into large exports (100+ gigabytes, up to 10 per mailbox) and mutt is very fast and responsive, so I've found an incantation for the config that strips the styling and layout.

What I don't have yet is the same for my bulk import to SQL database, but I'll probably figure something out in the next project where we need to analyse large amounts of email.

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