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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

#41

Post by ttoinou »

jasonkester wrote: post #31
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…

Yeah, I'm with you. I'll take email over Slack any day. Especially for something I may need to refer back to in the future. I had experience from the customer side of this situation, when Segment set up a Slack channel for an integration I was doing a few years ago. Lots of back and forth with their team (that would probably have been better as email), with some good, important stuff about how to work around particul…

It disappears from interface but You can still search for it and access it via the search bar

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

#42

Post by ttoinou »

eastbound wrote: post #29
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 If there’s one thing I hate more than email, it’s not being able to mark an item as unread, and put it in a folder to address it later. Slack is synonym of stress. The Slack stress compounds with being pinged all the time, on various topics. It transforms a developer role into a manager role.

You can Save for later any message…

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

#44

Post by agnivade »

belter wrote: post #37
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?

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: - Endless channel creation that buries crucial info... - Confusing side-panel threads that are easily missed, leading to fragmented discussions... - Notification overload that bombards you with pings... It's success it's a mystery, I can only attribute to fashion or the hype…

Curious to know what other alternatives have you found better.

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

#45

Post by snowe2010 »

agnivade wrote: post #44
belter wrote: post #37

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: - Endless channel creation that buries crucial info... - Confusing side-panel threads that are easily missed, leading to fragmented discussions... - Notification overload that bombards you with pings... It's success it's a mystery, I can only attribute to fashion or the hype…

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”

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

#46

Post by jdve »

agnivade wrote: post #44
belter wrote: post #37

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: - Endless channel creation that buries crucial info... - Confusing side-panel threads that are easily missed, leading to fragmented discussions... - Notification overload that bombards you with pings... It's success it's a mystery, I can only attribute to fashion or the hype…

Curious to know what other alternatives have you found better.

We use Twist at my company. I find the emphasis on asynchronous communication refreshing. It encourages more thoughtful discussion. Basecamp also lends helpfully in this direction, although adopting Basecamp means accepting an entire project management system as well.

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

#47

Post by ThinkBeat »

> 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.

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

#48

Post by snowe2010 »

simonkubica wrote: post #28

This will probably sound like an ad, and is probably not super HN-friendly (given it can be more fun to just hack a custom tool together), but we just use Pylon for this and was surprised OP didn't do the same

Well we can’t if we have no clue what pylon is. And searching is absolutely no help because I’m not sure if you’re saying pylon is a replacement for railway, or slack, or some other part of the blog post.

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

#50

Post by throwup238 »

belter wrote: post #37
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?

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: - Endless channel creation that buries crucial info... - Confusing side-panel threads that are easily missed, leading to fragmented discussions... - Notification overload that bombards you with pings... It's success it's a mystery, I can only attribute to fashion or the hype…

> 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?

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