1.
Slack for the mere mortals
ABE DIAZ
@ABE238

2.
Who am I?
 Developer -> Evangelist -> Program/Product
 Mobile Program Manager @
 Slack Enthusiast
 Contact Info:
 Twitter: @abe238
 info@abediaz.com

3.
History
 “We came to the conclusion that
Glitch was never going to be the
kind of business that would have
justified the $17.2 million dollars in
venture capital investment [that
we had] … So we decided to shut
it down without knowing what we
were going to do next.”
Ahem…remember
SharePoint’s story?

4.
IRC
IRC has no
archival feature.
This means both
parties need to
be online to
communicate.

5.
This sounds familiar?
Where have I seen this before?
 Yammer
 Lync
 Hip Chat
 Gitter
Yes… but.

6.
Adoption Numbers Don’t Lie
 750,000 people now use Slack daily, including users in 60,000 teams
 135,000 of those people are paying for Slack, adding up to $12
million in annual revenue
 Slack users send 300 million messages to each other a month
 The average Slack user is connected for more than nine hours a day
and spends more than two of those hours in active usage, such as
reading and writing messages
 “FASTEST-GROWING BUSINESS APP EVER” - FastCo

7.
Trend
Source: Google Trends
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=slack%2C%20hipchat%2C%20yammer%2C%20gitter&date=7%2F2012%2039m&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B7

8.
Slack’s Key Value Proposition
 All your team’s communications in one
place.
 Completely searchable (incredibly fast).
 On every device (iOS, Android, Windows,
MAC)

9.
Let’s get started
 Demo

10.
Out of the box
 Expands Links
 Emoji Palooza
 (including Custom Emojis)

11.
Out of the box
 Reminders
 Code Snippets and formatting
 Mindful

12.
Custom (Slash) Commands
 Demo
 /up

13.
Ok, now what?
 Integrations
 Bots

14.
Integrations
 Dead Simple
 Useful
 Not that much customization

15.
Most common integrations
 Github
 #ProTip: Limit to PRs, commits and comments can get too chatty.

16.
Most common integrations
 Crashalytics

17.
Most common integrations
 Jenkins
 #ProTip: Consider limiting by environment.

18.
Most common integrations
 Runscope

19.
Most common integrations
 Nagios

20.
Most common integrations
 Splunk

21.
Most common integrations
 PagerDuty

22.
But wait there’s more

23.
Bots
 Complete customization control
 Remove repetitive tasks from the team
 Democratize control
 Made possible by Webhooks (incoming and outgoing)

24.
Hubot
 Made popular by the Github team
 Runs JS and CoffeeScript
 Needs to be hosted (typically heroku)
 Great community (lots of plugins and support)
 Best Getting Started guide: https://github.com/michikono/slackbot-
tutorial

25.
Hubot use cases

26.
Hubot use cases

27.
Hubot use cases

28.
And that is what is called ChatOps
 “Bringing the work you are already doing… into the conversations
you are already having” - @jfryman
 Made popular by the StackStorm guys
 Event Driven Automation

29.
Boost Productivity
 Peek into your processes:
 Jira

30.
Trello

31.
Standups
 Tatsu.io
 Standups in Slack
 Summary by email

32.
Direct Customer Feedback
 Slack Button
 Get direct feedback from customers straight into Slack
 Twitter
 Slack’s Twitter Wall of Love
 Integrate with ZenDesk
and other tools.

33.
IFTTT & Zapier
 Augment the available integrations by creating your own
 E.g.
 Monitor Dropbox for changes to our vacation policy document and
broadcast in Slack.
 Google Spreadsheets – Fill a spreadsheet and let sales/marketing know
when someone tweets about our product in Slack.
 Slack the Company’s Stock price every time we beat earnings.
 Weather - If there is snow in the forecast, let everybody via Slack so they
can leave early.

34.
Other
 Drupal – post from a from straight into Slack room
(https://www.drupal.org/project/slack)
 Office 365 Calendar – Meeting starting now
(https://ifttt.com/office_365_calendar)
 Stripe – Let the team know how much growth in sales this month via
Slack.
 LaunchKit – Get your App reviews straight into Slack.

35.
Imma let ya finish

36.
Culture
Highfive = Hubot + TangoCard
Check out @benstraub talk
from CascadiaJS :
“Hacking Culture with JS”

37.
Why does this matter
 Culture
 Visibility & Trainability
 Productivity via automation

38.
So Stop Slacking and Start Slack’ing
 Questions?
http://bit.ly/slackmeremortals