Tag: slack

Hi there! How are you? I hope you are well!

So, here I was jumping right to the task. But where does someone start?

Observation 1

The documentation for Slack apps is literally all over the place!! Parts are deprecated, parts are misleading and finally some parts are totally useless (sorry Slack). You have to make decisions based on false info or without info at all!!

Start

Eventually, I created a @slack/bolt application on glitch.com!! Go figure!! Let me see if I can find the link, ok I got it but it is not public and I do not want to expose any details since when I started I had some hard-coded values in order to create the skeleton of the app, its backbone per se: an end-to-end barebones but complete functionality. Here is a photo of the UI I was working on at that point:

Of course, if you can see on the file structure on the left, this is the last copy of my glitch experimentations, you can see also an SQLite db file there, which now is gone!! Also, the main file here is still the app.js, basically everything is on that one file and the environment variables are on the .env file.

How did we get here though? Of course, the answer is from Slack documentation, hurraaaay!

… and this is a list of (not all) bookmarks I had to save on the browser to navigate through the chaos:

But, this post is getting a bit long. Let’s wrap it up and continue on the next episode of the Slack app odyssey 😀 See ya 👋

Cheers

Hi there! How are you? I hope you are well!

So, this time I would like to talk about how I started working on a Slack application! It all started from day-to-day problems at work and a former colleague of mine who had the initial idea of doing something about it. Or at least of asking someone to do something about it.

Problem

What was the initial problem: share somehow our daily standup on Tuesdays and Thursdays (when we did not have an actual call, no need for these extra calls)

Temporary solution?

We had to manually write our standup on the common Slack channel in a format which resembles an actual standup:

Yesterday:

1. I did this ticket
2. I did that ticket

Today:

1. I am doing this ticket

Blockers:

1. I am blocked with that ticket

As you can imagine, some people did it diligently, others did not respect the format at all or totally disregard it.

Inspiration

And then boom! Here came Tim with his obsession with automation! He proposed someone could make an app that would query Jira and build this statement automatically, as much as possible. I was immediately intrigued, I had never thought about creating a Slack app for any reason, why wouldn’t I give it a shot?

And so one of the biggest coding adventures I had (as a personal project) begun… And this is the craziest thing… It also finished! Unbelievable stuff. However, this is the topic of a consecutive article…

Until then, have fun coding, stay safe and keep calm and carry on!

Cheers

PS: by the way, you can find the app on the right sidebar, right there or you can visit our website for more info: https://post-your-standup.codinginsights.blog/