apidays LIVE JAKARTA - Connecting the Digital Stack How we Build APIs and Workflows at Slack Bear Douglas, Director Developer Relations, Slack

1. How we build APIs &
workflows at Slack
September 30, 2020

2. Bear Douglas
she/her
Director of Developer
Relations @SlackHQ

3. A brief history of
time Slack

8. Image: Greg Leuch and the Poncho team

10. Vodafone
streamlines
incident
management in
Slack
VODAFONE

11. Vodafone reduced meantime to
resolution from 20 minutes to 5 minutes

12. Slack helps
Hearst deliver
clickable
content in the
digital age
HEARST

13. Hearst’s custom Slack app
saves users 60 minutes daily

14. Hearst’s ecommerce revenue
nearly tripled since using HANS

15. DocuSign
automates
new-hire
onboarding in
Slack
DOCUSIGN

16. DocuSign’s custom workflow fosters
instant team connection

18. Easy things easy

19. What feels like it should be easy?
Notifications Rich data display Basic interactivity

20. Link unfurls

24. Templates
for
common
cases

25. Payload
A JSON payload
sent over POST
POST https://hooks.slack.com/services/T0000000/
B00000000/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Content-type: application/json
{
"text": "New request",
"blocks": [
{
"type": "section",
"text": {
"type": "mrkdwn",
"text": "I copied this from BKB!"
}
}
...
]
}

26. Easy things easy
easy for developers

27. Enter
Workflow
Builder

28. All of the templates, none of the JSON
(… almost)

29. Webhook setup in-client

30. Things we
had to
consider
● Rich feature set vs ease of use
● How do you discover workflows?
● Admin controls:
○ Who can build?
○ Where does data go?
○ What visibility do admins
get?

31. Ambitious things possible

32. Image: LA Times via source.opennews.org

33. What you
need to
build this
● Ability to post messages to
channels ✅
● Buttons (an Event API) ✅
● Message threads ✅
● Emoji events ✅

34. Awesome Slack UX, 2017

35. Awesome Slack UX, 2017

36. Developers
wanted
more
● They hacked together UI
elements we didn’t offer- or fell
back to NLP
● They edited and updated
messages constantly, which
thrashed channels full of people
● Apps just needed more space in
the client to use

37. The Slack app toolkit

40. Section with ... Context
Actions
Image Block
Divider
Fields
Datepicker
Radio
Section with ...
Static & Dynamic Selects Input & Multi-Line
Multi-Select

41. Modals
take app
actions
out of
messages

42. More
space in
the Home
tab

43. Similar UX
goals,
modern
Slack APIs

44. Similar UX
goals,
modern
Slack APIs

45. What we
needed to
build to
enable this
● A more robust set of UI
elements… and a lot of front-end
code to make them work
seamlessly across clients
● A way to publish modal views
contingent on user action
(trigger_id)
● New events in our API:
app_home_opened,
view_submission
● And lots of educational material

46. Helping make it possible

47. Don’t go it alone
Tools to help you get started
Community
Find others building apps
and integrations for their
teams: slackcommunity.com
SDKs
First party tooling for Node,
Python, and Java make it
easier to build
Slack Developer Tools
Install this Slack app to look
up docs, inspect message
structure, and more

50. We are always here to help.
slackcommunity.com

51. Thank you
And stick around to try this yourself with @colmisainmdom