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Slack

slack global view

slack global view

As promised in a previous post, here is a long due introduction of Slack and its wonders.

On paper, Slack is a messaging solution built to ease up communication between team members. In addition to their main dashboard, as shown on the right, you will find Android and iOS applications, that would allow you to always stay in touch with your team.

As far as I’ve seen, you may create as much channels as you want. Users may pick the channels they want to subscribe to, and would be invited to join if their name is mentioned in channels they’re not listening to already.

Notifications are based on your being here. If you do allow desktop notifications on your browser, you may get notified when someone talks about you. Or you may define filters, if you want to track specific words, or a whole channel. You may configure different notification schemes on your browser and phone, … The whole thing is pretty well thought, and realized.

Slack Snippet

Slack Snippet

Slack Code Block

Slack Code Block

One can easily insert short code blocks into conversations. Or large blocks may be uploaded as snippets, that can be expanded, reviewed separately or comment upon.

An other key of Slack is the considerable amount of integrations. Among them: Google Hangouts, Skype, GitHub, CircleCI, or the “WebHook” (allowing you to post your notifications to an URL).

slack codedeploy

slack codedeploy

There’s no definite use case for Slack. I’ve been using it with coworkers I never met with, and with a bunch of friends I went to school with. Whereas one of these friends also uses it with coworkers he daily sees.

slack notifications

slack notifications

Even if code is not your concern, or if you’re alone and want to reduce the amount of SPAM your scheduled jobs may generate: Slack can be interesting. Running backups, monitoring deployments, or even receiving notifications from some monitoring system, Slack is a powerful tool that may just change your life.

The only negative observation I could make is that, from time to time, I get disconnected from all my groups. I get reconnected automatically, usually in less than a minute. Although sometimes, I’m really locked out, I can’t connect to any of my groups via my Orange fiber. In the meantime, I can see that other services in AWS’s us-east-1 are unreachable (such as a pair of HAproxy I have – which I may reach through CloudFlare, which acts as a frontend for my proxies). No problem from my phone, switching the WiFi off, using Free. I guess there’s some peering issues, which, sadly, occurs almost daily.

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