> 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 would expect developers to dislike a web chat, as tech-savvy people generally seem to prefer more lightweight and customizable options.
> That context helps Railway Engineers deliver a truly first class support experience.
Much of the post reads like a rather annoying advertisement.
I was curious why it was a problem to support thousands of customers in the first place, and looks like the issues were in combining conversations over different communication channels, and that a single overloaded person used to create those Slack chats.
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 provider, and migration is not a big deal.
4. You can organise things in a way that works for you (inbox zero etc.), I find that a lot easier than the typical notifications.
5. It comes with all kinds of "integrations", e.g. GitLab comments can just be responded to via email, which I use a ton when on the go. A CI failure, customer question etc you can just forward to discuss it. When set up reasonably, it's the one communication channel you need.
It takes some discipline and self organisation, but I haven't heard about developers hating email. I think there's a ton of reasons not to hate it. Is it non-trivial to use well? Sure. Do others use it in questionable ways? Sure. The same is true for Slack and all that as well. But I can't think of anything that I found easier to manage at the end of the day.
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.
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.
Slack so far is just humans. Plus integrations mostly added by developers for developers.
Of course this can change at any time, and I'll have random robot spam in Slack. Which means I will have no option other than start ignoring Slack as well and start asking people to come to my desk. Which might cause me to finally go into carpentry as I have been promising to do for the last 15 years.
The nice thing about those Slack integrations is that you can usually have a conversation with your team to adjust them for usefulness, such as better signal to noise ratio.
"usually" is the key word there. A previous employer had a "learning" team that used their slack bot to send unblockable DMs to everyone in the company every time they released optional employee trainings. "Work like an NBA player!" The manager was verbally abusive to anyone who brought it up as an issue too.
They didn't program the bot very well though, because it had a separate employee->acct list from the org that you could modify to change who was messaged.
We add some apps ourselves to our own profiles (I have the Google Calendar one for example) but this is at least opt-in.
The problem with email is that you subscribe to a service (or “get subscribed to”) and suddenly there’s 200 messages per week on your inbox that you gotta filter out and figure what the heck you’re gonna do with…
The worst part is that you often NEED some of those notifications, a small portion of them at least, but an email notification is the shittiest form of notification ever when SaaS apps are involved, and SaaS apps rarely allow for good configuration granularity.
This. It's gotten to the point where I don't check email at all because of the constant spam of mails that are not actionable and/or urgent. There are so many different types of automated mails that setting up filters is a never-ending battle. For me, email now serves as an archive/log of everything that has been going on in the company. I search my email to find details about things I am notified about via other channels.
Due to many people doing this, all important notifications that are actually actionable are now sent via Slack as well. So far these notifications are only for things where I actually need to urgently respond or do something, so none of the spam has yet reached Slack.
Also, no one ever seems to personally send an email to another employee because Slack is always the better option, and people actually respond on Slack, unlike via email.
And if they do make them to slack, usually all those things that you would have to manually make filters for are usually in their own channels that you can just mute.
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.
Remind me -> in 20 mins / 1 hours / 4 hours / tomorrow / next week. Or you can click the 'save for later' bookmark icon with no time alert.
The pings are within your control. If your org has an unruly Slack workspace, get on top of your notification settings or just leave it closed most of the time and check in periodically.
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.
Both Slack and (most) email clients allow you to mark items as unread and set reminders. Being pinged all the time sounds more like an organisational issue, where comms channels are left to grow wild and unstructured. It's definitely not down to Slack.
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 answering mundane questions from people. Railway (like many DevTools at the time in 2021) was significantly more free than what it was today.
When I joined, we made the determination that Support Engineering, for the sake of our customers (staying sharp) and mental stimulation (we're not just help desk) - build our own automations to help users. (Blog post here: https://blog.railway.com/p/support-engineering-is-engineerin...)
(Railway also, intentionally, keeps our team small. Not out of elitism but out of alignment. The hardest part of working remote is making sure that people are on the same page. The tradeoff is that we are busier and need to be mindful about what work we take on. I, however, take it all on!)
Around 18 months ago or so- I started getting pulled into more revenue conversations as we moved upmarket. Railway moved into it's first proper plans. A lot of the prevailing advice we were getting was to start gating the product and start booking demos. 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. (Blog post: https://blog.railway.com/p/scale-not-sales)
In Railway's eyes- we think that Support/Sales is just the same thing just at different points of the developer's journey. A lot of engagements begin with a question.
The channel that did work was Slack Connect. After answering a question or two with companies on there- their usage would grow a lot. So we scaled that out!
Again, sorry if it read like an ad- not my intent.
> 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.
Yup. Excessive engagement maximizing is a bad thing for a communication method. If you succeed at maximizing engagement, all you have accomplished is a human Skinner-box. Good if you are in the business of selling attention, but not if you want productive employees.
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.
Did you even read the article? This is about offering companies a private 1:1 slack channel between your team and the support/sales team. Many companies offer this nowadays if you're on a large enough plan to be assigned an account manager and I prefer it >100x to email because I know a human is going to be in the loop.
I did read the article, but my experience is that many companies offer support in a public chat context (Slack, Discord) as their first line. 1:1 is certainly better, but you're still limited in your ownership of the conversation (you literally have to copy and paste it out of Slack if you want records, because they may otherwise vanish outside of your control). I also like being able to find all communication information in one place. I can search across multiple channels and contexts with email all at once, but not with Slack.
I get that it's a preference thing, so I'm not saying my position is correct for you. If you don't care about any of these things, I can see Slack being better.
"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that"."
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 particular issues.
Then one day, I get a message from a Success Engineer of some description saying that now we're up and running, they're going to "Archive" the channel. No worries. That must mean it'll go read-only, but at least I'll still have access to that good info in there. Better go copy/paste the whole thread somewhere safe though, just in case.
No. "Archive" is Slack for "Destroy Permanently". By the time I got the email, the Slack channel was 404ing. No more record of a conversation having ever taken place.
>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.
You wrote this and then;
>would expect developers to dislike a web chat, as tech-savvy people generally seem to prefer more lightweight
I can't think of a more bloated way to communicate than putting a browser in the middle. For some quick numbers, compare web browser input latency to terminal [0] where one might run an IRC client. Even emacs [1,2] is fast and light in comparison.
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?
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 chats multiple times for the unread indicator to disappear. With Slack I somewhat regularly have this problem, more than once a week.
- Like every other application on Windows, Ctrl+K works for adding a hyperlink. Slack is in fact so aware that people are used to using the Ctrl+K shortcut it even catches you trying to do it and then tells you how to add hyperlinks in their own special snowflake way.
- Doesn't clutter my Windows notification centre. Unless I clicked the notification center message it doesn't ever disappear. WhatsApp by comparison which also uses the Windows notification center does this perfectly. Slack is the same on iOS, it doesn't clear messages from the notification center once a message is read unless you clicked the notification.
Teams has its warts for sure, but I find it's considerably more polished than Slack in general.
It's not perfect, but I'm very productive and happy using it.
Windows 11 Pro on my Dell Latitude 5540 and it's a rock solid experience.
I on principle always format my disk drive when getting a new PC and reinstall using an ISO downloaded from Microsoft to ensure no OEM software is on them. For my Dell the only thing I install is "Dell Command | Update" (not to be confused with Dell SupportAssist which is crap targeting general consumers). It's for updating drivers and firmware and it does absolutely no nonsense, only prompting me when a driver or firmware update is available.
I use no third-party anti-malware, no "corporate management software", just Windows Defender, but with Dev Drive and exclusions to my working directories so everything is very fast for my development work with Visual Studio.
My work is mostly developing for .NET and Electron which works on Linux and macOS as well. WSL with Visual Studio is super impressive that I can seamlessly debug processes running under WSL from normal Visual Studio. For Electron / NodeJS debugging I can use VS Code which also supports debugging processes running under WSL.
I have done two registry tweaks to Windows 11 to remove a couple of annoyances:
- I've turned off the "simplified" context menu which shows by default in Windows Explorer, otherwise most of what I need is hidden behind an extra click of my mouse.
- I've turned off internet search results from showing on the Start Menu. This is a huge quality of life improvement, I've never ever cared for searching outside of my web browser and it makes the Start Menu super responsive and stops it showing web results above stuff on my local computer which was what I was looking for.
(As a side remark, I was very happy when I only somewhat recently worked out how to get iOS to stop showing web search results when I search my home screen for apps, that was a huge annoyance as I only want to search for apps on my phone by name and often it would show web searches over a locally installed app name.)
People constantly complain here about all the adverts on Windows 11. I honestly don't get any adverts, maybe it's because I'm in South Africa and not the US (marketing sounds like it's beyond obnoxious there). I think it came pre-installed (even when installing with the ISO downloaded from MS) with a few rubbish Windows Store apps (like Candy Crush), but I uninstalled them normally and nothing ever came back. I also use OneDrive already (which integrates really nicely with Windows), maybe if I didn't have it set up, Windows would be bugging me about it.
Install NetLimiter and be amazed with the MB/s of data that is getting uploaded into Microsoft when your PC is at rest, even when you open PowerPoint and are just editing a slide..
Install SystemInformer (the successor of ProcessHacker) and be amazed how Microsoft Telemetry will use 12 to 15% of your CPU even with the machine at rest...
- Multiple Visual Studio instances (with ReSharper)
- Several Electron(-like) based Applications
- Outlook Classic
- Slack
- Teams
- Docker Desktop
As is plain from the screenshot, there is not MB/s of network traffic, furthermore, the CPU is also pretty idle as one would expect from my not doing anything heavy (like compilation) at this moment. This is very typical for my PC most of the time.
Based on my decades of using Windows full time and my screenshot, your comment is absolutely not representative of typical idle resource usage.
I do however acknowledge that there is a recurring scheduled telemetry collection process which when it runs pegs an entire CPU Core for minutes. I do find this annoying when I notice it, but that's maybe every couple of months which isn't enough of an annoyance to me to waste my time worrying about it, or I might have actually already disabled it in Task Scheduler.
Some people on principle dislike telemetry which is a completely understandable viewpoint, but for me personally I'm okay with Microsoft collecting essentially anonymous usage statistics to better understand how people use their software and where best to direct their efforts.
No experience with slack but channels in teams are pretty terrible.
Notifications off by default so people create new channels with you as a member, write extremely important information inside them and you find out weeks later.
Each post is like an announcement so nobody uses them for the everyday trivial stuff you need a channel for. For casual technical discussion, asking for help. Whenever you post in a channel, assuming people enabled notifications and your post will be actually seen, everyone is compelled to answer as the UI screams for attention.
And don't get me started about it hiding part of a post by default so you answer thinking you read everything but you missed an essential part because post was 4 rows and 2 were hidden.
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...
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:
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...
The update last year where replies in threads ping you (make the icon red etc) same as if you got a mention/DM is just insane. Makes you accidentally ignore more crucial dms because non important threads get updated.
I wish Slack had a "don't mute this channel completely, but only show it as unread once a day".
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.
In Slack you get syntax highlighting if you use /snippet instead of Markdown fences, but everything else supports Markdown fences, so it seems dumb Slack doesn't and you have to discover a random slash command to do it. Similarly it bugs me that Slack's Markdown uses a different definition of italics and bold than CommonMark and most everyone else. I know the biggest standard of Markdown is that there is no real standard, but Slack's Markdown sure is less standard than normal.
- 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
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.
Also how does Slack still have an error where trying to move the cursor in/out of syntax highlighting can "trap" you so you no longer see the message that will actually get submitted.
You can desync the WYSWIG nature of it to the point where you submit text that was "invisible" to you while also potentially deleting text in the submission that you can still see.
A more simple to reproduce bug is that you can't edit before the first character of a syntax block. The cursor skips from outside the syntax block to after the first character inside the block.
It sorta supports syntax highlighting with text snippets (cmd-shift-return iirc), just not in regular backticks like Discord. It's not great, though. Copying directly from Slack rather than downloading may give you invisible characters in the data
ironically enough you can see from the screenshot of their "internal webhook" that they're using discord to log when a new support thread on slack is created!
Yeah, Discord for coding related things is far superior than anything else I've tried in the space (Slack, Teams, Skype, Mattermost, etc).
I've not actually used it in a professional setting but there are a large number of very active/thriving coding related communities (mostly open source, but not exclusively) and Discord seems to handle them well.
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.
This was the case at ${lastCo} and it bothered me to no end as PM. My job is literally talking to customers! Why do I need to chat to a relationship manager so that I can talk to my own customer?!?
That exact point was my very axe to grind and why I am thankful to work on all sorts of comms. automations at Railway when they let me.
All my customers are internal, but there's still usually a support ticket layer between the developer and the customer. I told all my customers, for the apps I own, just send me an email. No need to go through all that. They're thrilled and 6 years in there's been no issues.
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.
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.
I hope you stay better than Intel “community” forums where underpaid Intel employees take 3+ months to answer a post (original SLA was something like 2 days), return a poor quality response and then drop all further communication if the original author doesn’t respond in a couple of days (after waiting months).
That's my hope too- been at this company for 3+ years and there was a moment of time when it did truly feel like we would just spend time with only larger companies.
However, what's interesting is there is a direct correlation to the amount of conversations we can support and churn! We did put the walls up I'd say 18 months ago. Although it resulted in an okay business outcome as today, user churn numbers actually increased controlling for pricing changes.
Ever since we invested in our support tooling, we've been able to field more conversations and I think we (and the users) are better for it.
Talking to users- no matter how "small" they may be is a potential relationship for us to invest in. We will try to keep our heads to the ground always listening to users.
Talking to users and using our own product are the two hills we will die on. A company dies when they stop doing both, long before any financial reckoning I feel.
The blog post is a bit old but the point mostly stands- we try to keep our customers close to us, but lately, we have extolled the virtues of focus work, so we rotate the customer comms baton through our on-call system.
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.
Ye I feel like many times when people complain about email they complain about the emails' content not the concept of sending email, which is then misinterpreted.
The more I think about this, the more "don't shoot the messenger" fallacies I see around me.
Like, the complaints about overly bureaucratic documentation was interpreted as critique of documentation by "people". Etc.
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.
If I never subscribed I always report spam. It only takes very small percentages of recipients to do this for mailer services to start getting agitated about bounce rates.
I can qualify this- when we began, we had a tonne of fraud and a lot of students looking to host a VNC to circumvent their school restrictions. Our goal is to be the last cloud a developer has to think about. (More code repo integration vs. give me a machine.) So- when we wrote our fair use policy, we blanket banned VNC use cases.
It genuinely sucks that to stop 90 percent of suspicious use cases, you do get legitimate use in that net. For that I apologize.
Now since Railway has a better handle on fraud, we feel that we can loosen up the restrictions, so if a customer clarifies their use case, we don't mind. With that said, we don't offer raw VMs (yet) so you will find the platform a bit limiting a bit after our complete migration to self-hosted metal.
My startup yetto.app offers such an integration out of the box. We’re building a support tool that integrates with all sorts of communication platforms (email and Slack, but also GitHub, Jira, Zendesk, Linear, and SMS).
Regarding various comments here preferring email... let me say that I far, far prefer chat (and the instant notifications!). I would prefer Discord, but I'm just glad it's chat.
After saying that, let me share that Railway is incredible and very affordable.
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)
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...
Matrix itself is extremely solid. The most annoying thing are the clients. Element is the only decent one although it still is far from perfect. As for the freedom vs polished service, it's a no-brainer for any organization because with matrix they have the full control over the data and the service
> 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 would expect developers to dislike a web chat, as tech-savvy people generally seem to prefer more lightweight and customizable options.
> That context helps Railway Engineers deliver a truly first class support experience.
Much of the post reads like a rather annoying advertisement.
I was curious why it was a problem to support thousands of customers in the first place, and looks like the issues were in combining conversations over different communication channels, and that a single overloaded person used to create those Slack chats.
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 provider, and migration is not a big deal.
4. You can organise things in a way that works for you (inbox zero etc.), I find that a lot easier than the typical notifications.
5. It comes with all kinds of "integrations", e.g. GitLab comments can just be responded to via email, which I use a ton when on the go. A CI failure, customer question etc you can just forward to discuss it. When set up reasonably, it's the one communication channel you need.
It takes some discipline and self organisation, but I haven't heard about developers hating email. I think there's a ton of reasons not to hate it. Is it non-trivial to use well? Sure. Do others use it in questionable ways? Sure. The same is true for Slack and all that as well. But I can't think of anything that I found easier to manage at the end of the day.
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.
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.
Slack so far is just humans. Plus integrations mostly added by developers for developers.
Of course this can change at any time, and I'll have random robot spam in Slack. Which means I will have no option other than start ignoring Slack as well and start asking people to come to my desk. Which might cause me to finally go into carpentry as I have been promising to do for the last 15 years.
No "Slack apps" or Slack used as a notifications dump in your org? You are lucky.
But I would warn you: Slack doesn't solve the "stealing your attention issue" that you are currently experiencing only with email.
The nice thing about those Slack integrations is that you can usually have a conversation with your team to adjust them for usefulness, such as better signal to noise ratio.
"usually" is the key word there. A previous employer had a "learning" team that used their slack bot to send unblockable DMs to everyone in the company every time they released optional employee trainings. "Work like an NBA player!" The manager was verbally abusive to anyone who brought it up as an issue too.
They didn't program the bot very well though, because it had a separate employee->acct list from the org that you could modify to change who was messaged.
We add some apps ourselves to our own profiles (I have the Google Calendar one for example) but this is at least opt-in.
The problem with email is that you subscribe to a service (or “get subscribed to”) and suddenly there’s 200 messages per week on your inbox that you gotta filter out and figure what the heck you’re gonna do with…
The worst part is that you often NEED some of those notifications, a small portion of them at least, but an email notification is the shittiest form of notification ever when SaaS apps are involved, and SaaS apps rarely allow for good configuration granularity.
This. It's gotten to the point where I don't check email at all because of the constant spam of mails that are not actionable and/or urgent. There are so many different types of automated mails that setting up filters is a never-ending battle. For me, email now serves as an archive/log of everything that has been going on in the company. I search my email to find details about things I am notified about via other channels.
Due to many people doing this, all important notifications that are actually actionable are now sent via Slack as well. So far these notifications are only for things where I actually need to urgently respond or do something, so none of the spam has yet reached Slack.
Also, no one ever seems to personally send an email to another employee because Slack is always the better option, and people actually respond on Slack, unlike via email.
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.
By spam I mean unsolicited transactional notifications that can't be disabled, or can't be disabled without affecting important notifications.
And if they do make them to slack, usually all those things that you would have to manually make filters for are usually in their own channels that you can just mute.
> 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.
Remind me -> in 20 mins / 1 hours / 4 hours / tomorrow / next week. Or you can click the 'save for later' bookmark icon with no time alert.
The pings are within your control. If your org has an unruly Slack workspace, get on top of your notification settings or just leave it closed most of the time and check in periodically.
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.
Both Slack and (most) email clients allow you to mark items as unread and set reminders. Being pinged all the time sounds more like an organisational issue, where comms channels are left to grow wild and unstructured. It's definitely not down to Slack.
You can Save for later any message…
Besides the "Save for later" & co, just mute all the channels that aren't essential and leave the obsolete ones.
If someone wants to raise issues from marginal sources, let them go through the friction of messaging in the main channel or DMing.
You don't need to react to everything.
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 answering mundane questions from people. Railway (like many DevTools at the time in 2021) was significantly more free than what it was today.
When I joined, we made the determination that Support Engineering, for the sake of our customers (staying sharp) and mental stimulation (we're not just help desk) - build our own automations to help users. (Blog post here: https://blog.railway.com/p/support-engineering-is-engineerin...)
(Railway also, intentionally, keeps our team small. Not out of elitism but out of alignment. The hardest part of working remote is making sure that people are on the same page. The tradeoff is that we are busier and need to be mindful about what work we take on. I, however, take it all on!)
Around 18 months ago or so- I started getting pulled into more revenue conversations as we moved upmarket. Railway moved into it's first proper plans. A lot of the prevailing advice we were getting was to start gating the product and start booking demos. 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. (Blog post: https://blog.railway.com/p/scale-not-sales) In Railway's eyes- we think that Support/Sales is just the same thing just at different points of the developer's journey. A lot of engagements begin with a question.
The channel that did work was Slack Connect. After answering a question or two with companies on there- their usage would grow a lot. So we scaled that out!
Again, sorry if it read like an ad- not my intent.
> 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.
Yup. Excessive engagement maximizing is a bad thing for a communication method. If you succeed at maximizing engagement, all you have accomplished is a human Skinner-box. Good if you are in the business of selling attention, but not if you want productive employees.
> 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.
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.
Did you even read the article? This is about offering companies a private 1:1 slack channel between your team and the support/sales team. Many companies offer this nowadays if you're on a large enough plan to be assigned an account manager and I prefer it >100x to email because I know a human is going to be in the loop.
I did read the article, but my experience is that many companies offer support in a public chat context (Slack, Discord) as their first line. 1:1 is certainly better, but you're still limited in your ownership of the conversation (you literally have to copy and paste it out of Slack if you want records, because they may otherwise vanish outside of your control). I also like being able to find all communication information in one place. I can search across multiple channels and contexts with email all at once, but not with Slack.
I get that it's a preference thing, so I'm not saying my position is correct for you. If you don't care about any of these things, I can see Slack being better.
"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that"."
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 particular issues.
Then one day, I get a message from a Success Engineer of some description saying that now we're up and running, they're going to "Archive" the channel. No worries. That must mean it'll go read-only, but at least I'll still have access to that good info in there. Better go copy/paste the whole thread somewhere safe though, just in case.
No. "Archive" is Slack for "Destroy Permanently". By the time I got the email, the Slack channel was 404ing. No more record of a conversation having ever taken place.
It disappears from interface but You can still search for it and access it via the search bar
> Success Engineer
Yikes. I still haven't gotten over "Customer Success Agent".
I am so not ready for Success Engineering.
AI, take me away.
>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.
You wrote this and then;
>would expect developers to dislike a web chat, as tech-savvy people generally seem to prefer more lightweight
What?
Web chats are not heavy
I can't think of a more bloated way to communicate than putting a browser in the middle. For some quick numbers, compare web browser input latency to terminal [0] where one might run an IRC client. Even emacs [1,2] is fast and light in comparison.
[0] https://beuke.org/terminal-latency/#:~:text=6.2-,firefox%20(... [1] https://danluu.com/term-latency/#:~:text=terminal.app%20and%... [2] https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/#:~:text=0.8-,Em...
Okay, but it's still a generalization. Most people don't care at all about the issues you mention
The problem with email for me is that 99% is of no interest. At least with messages I only need to monitor channels relevant to me and dms.
They still offer support by email though
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 of chasing the latest trend.
> 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 chats multiple times for the unread indicator to disappear. With Slack I somewhat regularly have this problem, more than once a week.
- Like every other application on Windows, Ctrl+K works for adding a hyperlink. Slack is in fact so aware that people are used to using the Ctrl+K shortcut it even catches you trying to do it and then tells you how to add hyperlinks in their own special snowflake way.
- Doesn't clutter my Windows notification centre. Unless I clicked the notification center message it doesn't ever disappear. WhatsApp by comparison which also uses the Windows notification center does this perfectly. Slack is the same on iOS, it doesn't clear messages from the notification center once a message is read unless you clicked the notification.
Teams has its warts for sure, but I find it's considerably more polished than Slack in general.
Do you enjoy the other parts of MS ecosystem?
It's not perfect, but I'm very productive and happy using it.
Windows 11 Pro on my Dell Latitude 5540 and it's a rock solid experience.
I on principle always format my disk drive when getting a new PC and reinstall using an ISO downloaded from Microsoft to ensure no OEM software is on them. For my Dell the only thing I install is "Dell Command | Update" (not to be confused with Dell SupportAssist which is crap targeting general consumers). It's for updating drivers and firmware and it does absolutely no nonsense, only prompting me when a driver or firmware update is available.
I use no third-party anti-malware, no "corporate management software", just Windows Defender, but with Dev Drive and exclusions to my working directories so everything is very fast for my development work with Visual Studio.
My work is mostly developing for .NET and Electron which works on Linux and macOS as well. WSL with Visual Studio is super impressive that I can seamlessly debug processes running under WSL from normal Visual Studio. For Electron / NodeJS debugging I can use VS Code which also supports debugging processes running under WSL.
I have done two registry tweaks to Windows 11 to remove a couple of annoyances:
- I've turned off the "simplified" context menu which shows by default in Windows Explorer, otherwise most of what I need is hidden behind an extra click of my mouse.
- I've turned off internet search results from showing on the Start Menu. This is a huge quality of life improvement, I've never ever cared for searching outside of my web browser and it makes the Start Menu super responsive and stops it showing web results above stuff on my local computer which was what I was looking for.
(As a side remark, I was very happy when I only somewhat recently worked out how to get iOS to stop showing web search results when I search my home screen for apps, that was a huge annoyance as I only want to search for apps on my phone by name and often it would show web searches over a locally installed app name.)
People constantly complain here about all the adverts on Windows 11. I honestly don't get any adverts, maybe it's because I'm in South Africa and not the US (marketing sounds like it's beyond obnoxious there). I think it came pre-installed (even when installing with the ISO downloaded from MS) with a few rubbish Windows Store apps (like Candy Crush), but I uninstalled them normally and nothing ever came back. I also use OneDrive already (which integrates really nicely with Windows), maybe if I didn't have it set up, Windows would be bugging me about it.
Really, everything just works seamlessly for me.
> Really, everything just works seamlessly for me
Install NetLimiter and be amazed with the MB/s of data that is getting uploaded into Microsoft when your PC is at rest, even when you open PowerPoint and are just editing a slide..
Install SystemInformer (the successor of ProcessHacker) and be amazed how Microsoft Telemetry will use 12 to 15% of your CPU even with the machine at rest...
At this moment this is what my system usage looks like:
https://imgur.com/a/yCk2YDq
This is with me running:
- Several browser windows
- Multiple Visual Studio instances (with ReSharper)
- Several Electron(-like) based Applications
- Outlook Classic
- Slack
- Teams
- Docker Desktop
As is plain from the screenshot, there is not MB/s of network traffic, furthermore, the CPU is also pretty idle as one would expect from my not doing anything heavy (like compilation) at this moment. This is very typical for my PC most of the time.
Based on my decades of using Windows full time and my screenshot, your comment is absolutely not representative of typical idle resource usage.
I do however acknowledge that there is a recurring scheduled telemetry collection process which when it runs pegs an entire CPU Core for minutes. I do find this annoying when I notice it, but that's maybe every couple of months which isn't enough of an annoyance to me to waste my time worrying about it, or I might have actually already disabled it in Task Scheduler.
Some people on principle dislike telemetry which is a completely understandable viewpoint, but for me personally I'm okay with Microsoft collecting essentially anonymous usage statistics to better understand how people use their software and where best to direct their efforts.
No experience with slack but channels in teams are pretty terrible.
Notifications off by default so people create new channels with you as a member, write extremely important information inside them and you find out weeks later.
Each post is like an announcement so nobody uses them for the everyday trivial stuff you need a channel for. For casual technical discussion, asking for help. Whenever you post in a channel, assuming people enabled notifications and your post will be actually seen, everyone is compelled to answer as the UI screams for attention.
And don't get me started about it hiding part of a post by default so you answer thinking you read everything but you missed an essential part because post was 4 rows and 2 were hidden.
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...
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
I used Teams for years and I like it, really.
I also use Discord privately, so I know the alternative
The update last year where replies in threads ping you (make the icon red etc) same as if you got a mention/DM is just insane. Makes you accidentally ignore more crucial dms because non important threads get updated.
I wish Slack had a "don't mute this channel completely, but only show it as unread once a day".
> Notification overload that bombards you with pings...
95% of people that say this don't mute channels (at all or enough).
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...
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 :)
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.
I found that the way Basecamp tries to achieve async communication is to make sync communication as painful as possible. Not a great experience.
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"
on the free tier discord also has some more useful functionality which, iirc, slack doesn’t have on free tier or has a lot of limits on
- free voice/video channels (persistent meeting rooms)
- put text/voice channels into categories
- RBAC for channel categories, text and voice channels (only engineering role can see engineering stuff)
- mute notifications from specific channels or categories
probably some more but can’t think of them off the top of my head.
straight up, if i were starting something tomorrow, i’d use discord and not slack.
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!
In Slack you get syntax highlighting if you use /snippet instead of Markdown fences, but everything else supports Markdown fences, so it seems dumb Slack doesn't and you have to discover a random slash command to do it. Similarly it bugs me that Slack's Markdown uses a different definition of italics and bold than CommonMark and most everyone else. I know the biggest standard of Markdown is that there is no real standard, but Slack's Markdown sure is less standard than normal.
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
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.
Also how does Slack still have an error where trying to move the cursor in/out of syntax highlighting can "trap" you so you no longer see the message that will actually get submitted.
You can desync the WYSWIG nature of it to the point where you submit text that was "invisible" to you while also potentially deleting text in the submission that you can still see.
A more simple to reproduce bug is that you can't edit before the first character of a syntax block. The cursor skips from outside the syntax block to after the first character inside the block.
It sorta supports syntax highlighting with text snippets (cmd-shift-return iirc), just not in regular backticks like Discord. It's not great, though. Copying directly from Slack rather than downloading may give you invisible characters in the data
ironically enough you can see from the screenshot of their "internal webhook" that they're using discord to log when a new support thread on slack is created!
Yeah, Discord for coding related things is far superior than anything else I've tried in the space (Slack, Teams, Skype, Mattermost, etc).
I've not actually used it in a professional setting but there are a large number of very active/thriving coding related communities (mostly open source, but not exclusively) and Discord seems to handle them well.
this
Markdown is a technical, not business tool? Gamers tend to be technical?
[flagged]
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.
This was the case at ${lastCo} and it bothered me to no end as PM. My job is literally talking to customers! Why do I need to chat to a relationship manager so that I can talk to my own customer?!?
That exact point was my very axe to grind and why I am thankful to work on all sorts of comms. automations at Railway when they let me.
All my customers are internal, but there's still usually a support ticket layer between the developer and the customer. I told all my customers, for the apps I own, just send me an email. No need to go through all that. They're thrilled and 6 years in there's been no issues.
Because you don’t have people skills!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo
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.
I hope you stay better than Intel “community” forums where underpaid Intel employees take 3+ months to answer a post (original SLA was something like 2 days), return a poor quality response and then drop all further communication if the original author doesn’t respond in a couple of days (after waiting months).
That's my hope too- been at this company for 3+ years and there was a moment of time when it did truly feel like we would just spend time with only larger companies.
However, what's interesting is there is a direct correlation to the amount of conversations we can support and churn! We did put the walls up I'd say 18 months ago. Although it resulted in an okay business outcome as today, user churn numbers actually increased controlling for pricing changes.
Ever since we invested in our support tooling, we've been able to field more conversations and I think we (and the users) are better for it.
Talking to users- no matter how "small" they may be is a potential relationship for us to invest in. We will try to keep our heads to the ground always listening to users.
Talking to users and using our own product are the two hills we will die on. A company dies when they stop doing both, long before any financial reckoning I feel.
ah -- so they aren't "working in slack" that's just how/where the users interface.
Yep- key point, we work in Discord. We blogged about that too, https://blog.railway.com/p/how-we-work
The blog post is a bit old but the point mostly stands- we try to keep our customers close to us, but lately, we have extolled the virtues of focus work, so we rotate the customer comms baton through our on-call system.
> 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.
I prefer email. I'd really prefer if people read what I write though. The big problem with email is people can't read.
Ye I feel like many times when people complain about email they complain about the emails' content not the concept of sending email, which is then misinterpreted.
The more I think about this, the more "don't shoot the messenger" fallacies I see around me.
Like, the complaints about overly bureaucratic documentation was interpreted as critique of documentation by "people". Etc.
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.
My bad. It's a customer support platform built for/around Slack Connect
Thank you :)
Same thought. Pylon is exactly this but in a polished SaaS app.
I like email. Just too many damn spam emails.
I agree, the growth marketer trend of nailing users with a marketing mailer every week drives me insane.
That gets an instant unsubscribe from me.
Sometimes it even works...
If I never subscribed I always report spam. It only takes very small percentages of recipients to do this for mailer services to start getting agitated about bounce rates.
Do you ever subscribe to any form of mailing list? Email is not the place where I read content.
Yep honestly I got so tired of wading through marketing emails that I built a (free) email digest service for updates / changelogs from SaaS tools.
https://getchangelog.com
I was sold immediately i read sales pitch. But when registering i noticed one curiosity.
No VNCs/Virtual desktops.
Why is that? If i'm paying for resource usage and i don't see what's illegal about VNC, why is that?
I can qualify this- when we began, we had a tonne of fraud and a lot of students looking to host a VNC to circumvent their school restrictions. Our goal is to be the last cloud a developer has to think about. (More code repo integration vs. give me a machine.) So- when we wrote our fair use policy, we blanket banned VNC use cases.
It genuinely sucks that to stop 90 percent of suspicious use cases, you do get legitimate use in that net. For that I apologize.
Now since Railway has a better handle on fraud, we feel that we can loosen up the restrictions, so if a customer clarifies their use case, we don't mind. With that said, we don't offer raw VMs (yet) so you will find the platform a bit limiting a bit after our complete migration to self-hosted metal.
My startup yetto.app offers such an integration out of the box. We’re building a support tool that integrates with all sorts of communication platforms (email and Slack, but also GitHub, Jira, Zendesk, Linear, and SMS).
Regarding various comments here preferring email... let me say that I far, far prefer chat (and the instant notifications!). I would prefer Discord, but I'm just glad it's chat.
After saying that, let me share that Railway is incredible and very affordable.
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!
We used "Unblocked" on our documentation + slack. It's pretty neat.
Ooooo- thanks for sharing. Is this the bot that you are referring to?
https://slack.com/marketplace/A044USEAHRV-unblocked
I will try it out and see how it performs.
Oh, I thought this was going to be something about Spolsky's old StackOverflow.com. It's just a blog about doing slack chats.
We've changed the title now. Submitted title was "Slack Overflow".
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)
Matrix itself is extremely solid. The most annoying thing are the clients. Element is the only decent one although it still is far from perfect. As for the freedom vs polished service, it's a no-brainer for any organization because with matrix they have the full control over the data and the service
meh, freenode had 90K users at its peak =P
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check out usepylon.com - has customer support w/ native slack integrations