Slack offers many IRC-like features, including persistent chat rooms (channels) organized by topic, private groups, and direct messaging. Content, including files, conversations, and people, is all searchable within Slack. Users can add emoji buttons to their messages, on which other users can then click to express their reactions to messages.
At Wehkamp we ❤️ Slack! Seriously, in order to improve our efficiency, we’ve connected many of our applications, alerts and dashboards to Slack channels. But, as with all things, there is a right way and a wrong way of integrating a webhook at enterprise level.
Let’s explore how easy it is to create an application.
Last week I was working on a Databricks script that needed to produce a Slack message as its final outcome. I lifted some code that used a Slack client that was PIP-installed. Unfortunately, I could not use the package on my cluster. Fortunately, the Slack API is so simple, that you don’t really need a package to post a simple message to a channel. In this blog I’ll show you the simplest way of producing awesome messages in Slack.
Slack is fully awesome. At Wehkamp we use it for our internal communication and as a tool for our DevOps. The Slack API allows us to build even more advanced integrations. In this blog I’ll explore how to use the API to create powerful progress indicators by updating a Slack message.
To give teams a jump start we’ve created the bot-zero open source project. It solves some setup and development problems. In this blog I’ll show how to get up and running in minutes and I’ll explain some of the choices we’ve made.
If you set up a new Hubot using the Slack Developer Kit for Hubot you’ll get an awesome bot, but with a lot of useless stuff in it. In this blog I’ll outline all the things that can be safely cleaned up. The scripts can run on both Powershell (Windows) and Bash (Linux/Mac).
Lately we’ve been playing around with ChatOps at Wehkamp. We added a Hubot to our Slack channels to automate some operational jobs. It makes work more fun and way easier. As it is hosted in our own infrastructure, it can interact with our micro-services. In this article I explore how to use ES6 and a Promise to implement a call to a simple web-service.