Easy things easy, hard things possible: how Slack builds our platform for changing needs at work

The core of the session is to provide a thorough summary and outline how open platforms in combination with "intuitive" APIs form a reliable basis to manage the daily challenges developers face.

In the beginning, there were notifications. In under 5 minutes, developers could set up a webhook to ping into Slack when something– a PR, the CI pipeline– needed attention. Then there were chatbots and UI features like buttons that enabled people to act on those notifications. Nowadays, entire business processes, from standups to incident management, are run end-to-end on Slack, and many more teams outside engineering are catching on to the power of bringing data, tools, and people together in one place.

We believe that everyone should have access to the dramatic improvements in work efficiency and simplicity that ChatOps brought to DevOps teams. So how do you serve power users’ increasingly sophisticated needs, while keeping useful things like notifications ultra-easy to build and set up? This talk will cover how Slack has thought through making our platform more robust (and some of the hacks that inspired our designs), as well as how we keep developer and non-technical builder simplicity in mind.

Best for: Senior Developers and Team Leads