Chat Ops - social and technical

northfieldit.com@SeanWalbergJoin us this week on slack.prdcdeliver.com
Water Boy, my robotic coworker
Sean Walberg <sean@ertw.com>
Infrastructure guy
Northfield IT

northfieldit.comJoin us this week on slack.prdcdeliver.com @SeanWalberg

https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizbrooks/2502106228/
Conversations happen in private and
in different places

We repeat
work.
Repeatedly.

We are
constantly
context
switching
when
solving
problems

Enter Chat
A transparent,
distributed, shared CLI
for your organization.

What is chat?

Enter ChatOps

I’m not kidding!
 It’s familiar
 It’s asynchronous
 It’s also synchronous!
 It can run on anything
 It’s auditable
 It’s searchable
 It’s fun!

Our work happens in the open!

Training docs? We have history!

Documents are a future lie
Our chat history is always current.
It updates as we discuss our environment.
Chat really is a “living document”.

The two sides of ChatOps

Good chat services have APIs
 Post messages to a channel
 Receive messages, both direct and group
 Send rich attachments
(or open protocols)

Easily POSTable status messages

Context and conversation
Here we are, doing our work, then…
Now we know who has it, and can discuss if need be.
And now we all know it’s fixed

Push information, when it matters

General usage
robot.respond /git er done/i, (msg) ->
msg.send "Will do #{msg.message.user.name}!”
robot.hear /demo on (.*) is at (.*)/i, (msg) ->
# Access the message itself
robot.router.post "/hubot/say", (req, res) ->
# respond to POST from the outside
httprequest = msg.http(…) # call out

Pre-canned and custom scripts

Making JIRA suck less

Automate third party services

Troubleshoot in public

Long and complicated commands?

You know what didn’t work?
robot.respond /deploy consulator/i, (msg) ->
robot.respond /deploy node (.*) to (.*)/i, (msg) ->
Factoids
Tracking team demos

What if I make
a bot and
nobody uses
it?
(or how do I
get people to
use my bot?)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/vr/2364953428/

Like a mullet, it needs a mix

A good bot…
 Helps people do their work
 Is fun to use
 Is easy to change
 Contributes to your company culture

Reduce context switches

Teach them to fish.

Let people express themselves
Giphy got annoying quickly. “image me” is banned. We prefer “meme me” and emoji.
In-jokes are fun to add.

Make it easy to change

Encourage acknowledgements

Behaviour modification

Peer Pressure As A Service

It can be a gateway drug

Where to start?
 Start with your team.
 The product doesn’t matter.
 Be careful of “too much fun”
 Let it expand organically

Let’s collaborate over chat! Right now!
 Prairie Tech Slack – http://slack.prdcdeliver.com
 Talk with attendees and speakers (#our-robotic-
coworker)
 After the conference this becomes a regional tech
discussion – learn about meetups, jobs, get help
 Invite your cow-orkers and friends

https://github.com/WpgTech/gilfoyle
https://github.com/WpgTech/erlich

sean.walberg@northfieldit.com
@seanwalberg
If you like ChatOps and automation, I’d like
to work with you. Come to the Northfield
booth, we’d love to learn more about you.

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