8 ms·

Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

164 points by CharlesW 2y ago

ncr100 2y ago
Lol I rarely received notifications that I expect to. (I've checked my settings and done nothing else to fix it, not tried reproducing behavior nor reporting it to Slack.) Paid server. Android client. Lightly used, in part due to the absence of notifications. It's been over a year that I've missed notifications. More than 50% missed, comments to my threads especially, and also new messages on watched channels.
- chatmasta 2y ago
  Do you have a bot or script somewhere that’s using your token and appearing to “read” messages before you see them yourself?
- orf 2y ago
  A notification in this context isn’t a push notification, it’s a Slack notification (a red bubble counter). Sounds like an issue with your android phone.
rpicard 2y ago
Content aside (it’s good too), I love this blog and post visually.
- theSuda 2y ago
  I had to turn off my Dark Reader to light mode to see it. Yes, this is a very elegant, easy on the eyes and fun to read website/blog. I would like to use this theme unless it is a fully custom site.
deathanatos 2y ago
That complexity in the flow chart is probably just straight bugs, like TFA gets into. For example, I'm sure the flow chart — if you made one — for message "parsing" would be similarly complex. And it shows, on the client, since it feels less like there's a parser, and more like someone has cobbled a bunch of regexes together. There's a number of rather trivial to discover bugs¹, particularly around code block formatting and hyperlinks. That Slack will actively mutates entered text is doubly infuriating. Similarly, complex flowcharts aren't necessarily something to be proud of, rather, something to be eyed with suspicion. Is that complexity essential complexity, or accidental complexity? (Though sometimes it can be infuriatingly difficult to simplify. I've attacked a few such codepaths in my career only to come out going "nope, it's just that terrible/complex.") On notifications, one of the best things I ever set up was making my name a notification trigger. Lets me know when people are talking about me (or even to me), but aren't using a @- tag. Some people just … don't seem to know how to do it? ¹trivial enough that it leaves me wondering: does Slack's own eng use Slack, with cognitive awareness of the things that they run into?
- isoprophlex 2y ago
  > That Slack will actively mutates entered text is doubly infuriating. Slack is not good with that but man what are the people smoking that designed MS Teams? What the actual fuck happens when you try to type, copy, paste or send a message?! Slack is an oasis of sanity, compared.
  - claudex 2y ago
    That's because Teams purpose was to replace Skype. You can't replace Skype with a working tool, it will disturb the users.
xyst 2y ago
I just turn off notifications completely. Horribly implemented notification systems have completely turned me away. DnD on? Nope still get notified. Government sends Amber alert? Yea let’s full send it across the entire state for a crack head vs police incident that occurred 500 miles away at 4AM. Severe weather alerts have now been moved to voice calls and that number whitelisted in my contacts
- sethops1 2y ago
  I see that you also live in Texas
- theideaofcoffee 2y ago
  Same, my phone was gradually turning into another point of control over me, rather than the other way around and it being a tool to help me. Only a handful of people are default allowed through DnD, all of the nonsense government alerts are off, almost all app notifications are off save for absolutely the most important ones. If an app somehow breaks through after all of that, it's an instant uninstall, I just don't want to waste any more of my life than I alerady have being subservient to this shit. It's a daily annoyance to have to dismiss popups in apps when they notice they can no longer send notifications. Almost as annoying as the notifications themselves. Most work apps have a permanent 'Away' status and a message on and the expectation set that I sparingly check throughout the day. It works really well, my mind has never been quieter and more at ease.
  - dangsux 2y ago
    [dead]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
kibwen 2y ago
I don't know if I'd classify the cleaner diagram as "cheating" per se, but it does trade one kind of complexity for another kind. Removing nodes by adding a concept of implicit branches via "unless" clauses within a node doesn't necessarily make the system any easier to understand at a glance. Sometimes systems have good reason to be complex, and sometimes we have good reasons to hide much of that complexity, but let's not conflate hidden complexity with the lack of complexity. If I were to suggest a way to make the original chart cleaner without changing the quantity of explicit nodes and branches, I would start by reducing it into parts that are cyclic and parts that are acyclic, then drawing clear divisions between those parts. Then you could give these encapsulated bits names and thereby make it easier for them to refer to each other (such as in the duplicated flows between local and global preferences) without having to draw a mess of crisscrossing lines.
- NBJack 2y ago
  I agree with you; it is hand-wavey and strays into "spherical cows in a vacuum" territory. Practical for discussions, not so great for implementations, where details matter greatly. I would presume the original diagram was meant to align on the specifics; the revised version from the author leaves much to interpretation.
  - cushpush 2y ago
    > I expect it is also easier to verify the correctness of and find bugs in my diagram if someone were to want to. This will vary on the language in which it is implemented, right?
- IshKebab 2y ago
  I think it's ok to combine simple booleans into one box for the same reason we do that in code. You generally write `if a and b { foo }` not `if a { if b { foo } }`.
  - nimblegorilla 2y ago
    From my perspective simple boolean means a single known value stored in one variable. I suspect the underlying code performs a number of calculations for each one of the flow chart "booleans". Of course, maybe that points to a design flaw and there should be a single policy instance that aggregates all of the variables into one place.
VyseofArcadia 2y ago
Maybe the real source of complexity in that flowchart is there are just too many ways to suppress notifications. You have muting, do not disturb, do not disturb overrides, @message preferences per channel and global, DM preferences, and so on. I love dials and knobs and sliders in my software, but at some point when they are all for the same feature, there is no longer any way for the user to intuit how they interact.
- puzzledobserver 2y ago
  I think this is the real question to ask. Does the complicated flowchart point to deficiencies in the Slack user interface? If the user cannot intuit the flowchart, then how can they (as several sibling comments rightly point out) reliably turn notifications on or off? Algorithmic transparency should be a thing, no?
  - swatcoder 2y ago
    "Feature flag" development culture is in direct conflict with user's having intuitive, consistent experiences that they can model in their head. If the vendor needs a database report to see what features the user may encounter in any given session, because it's an n-dimensional matrix that changes based on uncountably many factors, there is no mental modeling to be done. The user just experiences some idiosyncratic amalgam of code in each session, and the vendor watches aggregate metrics to make sure the number of users in immediate crisis remains below some threshold -- bringing in a $XXXX/hr on-call team to identify and apply some adequately impactful change if it breaks over. Meanwhile, the users-in-crisis cross their fingers that the next time they open the app, they get a better roll on the feature matrix and encounter a more tolerable subset of issues. If you want to be able to understand your software and know how to turn things on and off, you need to demand a whole new (old) approach to building and publishing things. We're way off track right now.
    - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
      Feature flag development culture is the only practical way to do continuous delivery. The old approach is still used in markets where it makes sense - database systems, for example, often have only a handful of releases per year. But there's a lot of markets where it's just not feasible to make customers wait 3-6 months between when you finish developing a feature and when it's available for use.
dakiol 2y ago
I can’t work with notifications enabled. Every hour I work, I make a 15 min pause or so and then I check Slack and answer if needed. Not just Slack, I don’t have any notifications enabled. I always pull. The only exception is phone calls.
- ivewonyoung 2y ago
  I wish I could do that but rarely I do get something that needs my attention immediately because I don multiple hats including Infrastructure,SRE,DevOps,SysOps,programmer etc.
  - anitil 2y ago
    I have a second channel for urgent things, which is a phone call. I've told everyone that I'm available whenever, but they need to pick up the phone and call me. Surprisingly that little bit of friction seems to downgrade issues from 'urgent' to 'we can fix it tomorrow'
    - ivewonyoung 2y ago
      The issue is that sometimes something comes up that I can choose to quickly address and get folks going again. Adding that friction causes waste of time.
LudwigNagasena 2y ago
I look at the first flowchart and think to myself, were all the product managers, business analysts, and UX designers drunk when all of that was getting implemented?
- ziml77 2y ago
  No. People just interact with these messaging systems in a variety of ways and the notification flow here has to account for that. Each sender might use @s and threads differently and then the recipients might have different tolerances for what they end up seeing notifications for. If you provide fewer options for the recipients, it's far more likely they'll just blanket disable notifications.
  - LudwigNagasena 2y ago
    If you provide intractable options, it’s far more likely people will just blanket disable notifications.
taeric 2y ago
I didn't see a previous discussion on the flowchart, so I'm not entirely sure why folks were wrong about it. I do like the updated version. Fun to explore why. First, it is much much more linear. Effectively top down. Directions are consistent in outcome. Left is always "don't" and right is "do." There is no back tracking.
Kwpolska 2y ago
Flowcharts tend to suck when trying to describe anything remotely complicated. I doubt anyone is seriously using the original flowchart to get any work done, the actual code must be more readable, and would be guaranteed to be correct. On the other hand, overloading a flowchart with things like "unless" or "including" makes it harder to follow.
- XorNot 2y ago
  That flowchart is absolutely what happens when a bunch of programmers got told to "draw the complete system" in one diagram - which is absolutely not how it should've been represented.
satisfice 2y ago
The most important thing to me about the original diagram is that it is underspecified-- you can't determine its meaning just by reading it and also having a basic knowledge of Slack. To understand it you need a close and detailed knowledge of Slack UI and behavior that I don't believe has been officially documented. In fact, I'm left with questions about this diagram I can't answer even after experimenting with Slack. In other words, there is important tacit knowledge required to interpret the logic. I wonder if there is an updated version of this available anywhere?
m463 2y ago
I think slack notifications are complicated, but getting them shows you things you should see, while eliminating garbage distractions. That said, I still get silly @here and @channel stuff sometime even turned off per-channel, and miss some thread notifications. So I wish you could color-code channels/messages/threads to know whether you will be notified and let you tweak things if not. I think a lot of complexity can be visualized and that helps us fragile fallible humans.
hatthew 2y ago
guys I simplified it to a single node in a flowchart, this is even simpler right? (user not DND || message DND override) && ((message in thread && user in thread && user threads_everything) || ((channel notifications everything || (channel notifications unset && global notifications everything)) && ((message not in thread || user in thread) || (message has @channel || (message has @here && user is active)) && @channel messages not muted) || message contains @mention || message contains highlight word || message is on file owned by user))
teeray 2y ago
Slack Flowchart: Should we send a notification? Me: mutes all notifications at the OS for Slack.
Inviz 2y ago
This specific problem is better solved by decomposing the logic into rules that tell when not to send a message. I refactored this diagram once that way, so it becomes absolutely straightforward.
luke_galea 2y ago
I think the slack flowchart is a great example of where declarative programming really shines. You might enjoy this talk about rules engines where I simplify part of Slack's notification logic: https://youtu.be/mDnntrhk-8g?si=K1_8pU-Ck1fsCUM5 https://youtu.be/mDnntrhk-8g?si=K1_8pU-Ck1fsCUM5 Fun stuff!
- psd1 2y ago
  I will invest that time later. In anticipation, thanks. I came here to see if anyone was talking about state machines that generate their own flowcharts, or codegen from flowcharts. I'd like to know if there's prior art. It would be great for user acceptance. I'm minded to have a go myself, possibly with mermaid as an intermediate description. Stupid? Non-stupid?
  - tibor_a 2y ago
    I have similar thoughts but I also didn't have chance to do proper investigation of the prior art :).
    - psd1 2y ago
      Icymi, luke_galea mentioned graphviz in ruby Next challenge: generate fsm from mermaid flow chart!
  - luke_galea 2y ago
    There is a library in Ruby to generate graphviz from state machines: https://github.com/state-machines/state_machines-graphviz https://github.com/state-machines/state_machines-graphviz
nlawalker 2y ago
> To me this is way easier to understand. > I know this is not 100% bug-for-bug compatible with the original flowchart. “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/07/17/solution/?amp=1 https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/07/17/solution/?amp=1) (It’s not my intent to be totally dismissive, the author has good points, but I couldn’t resist the pithy but misquoted quote)
doctorpangloss 2y ago
Maybe Slack should stop making an LLM for data mining and chatbots, and instead, deploy an LLM to read a message and determine whether or not you should be notified, because notifications from Slack truly suck.
Terr_ 2y ago
A separate gripe: Still no support for "batching up" a trickle of notifications from a particular DM/channel, which is especially frustrating on the phone-app. *bzzzt* You probably met him, that one guy *bzzzt* who sends messages like this *bzzzt* and each time your phone vibrates for attention *bzzzt* but you never needed to know that soon anyway.
- Self-Perfection 2y ago
  Telegram does batching for group notifications.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  I wish my OS did this. And no, not with a LLM “summary”. Just literally rate limit the notifications.
- redrove 2y ago
  bzzzt Hello * waits 20 minutes * bzzzt How are you? * waits 3-24h * bzzzt Can you help me with XYZ? I answer ASAP I hate these people. It’s such a drain on my mental well being.
  - switch007 2y ago
    You can mute people now. Thank god
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    I wonder if anyone's done a study on those different styles, clustering them with other things like type of work or personality traits. I anecdotally associate "those people" with either: 1. Job roles (e.g. Sales) or personalities that are accustomed to interactively pushing people to do things for them 2. People who don't feel safe assuming that I can/will help. 3. Someone struggling to describe their problem up front, so they aren't sure what to place in my metaphorical inbox 4. There are multiple people they could reach out to for help, and they're trying to determine which person might react soonest. (But they aren't using other strategies like posting their problem in a channel and @-mentioning multiple potential helpers.) Their problem may or may not merit the kind of latency they're looking for.
fungiblecog 2y ago
Terrible design. This is why I hate modern software. If the devs barely understand it how are the users supposed to.
coldtea 2y ago
Anybody knows how either/both of the flowcharts in the post were made? Is it Mermaid, Graphviz, some other tool/lib, some GUI tool like Visio, Lucid Charts, etc?
jgalt212 2y ago
That flow chart is crazy. It would be quicker to consider and think about every instance on a case by case basis rather than consult that chart. Snark aside, I do think the flowchart could be useful for the QA team to verify, approve, or disapprove of decisions made by the implementation team.
jcgrillo 2y ago
For anything remotely complex flowcharts tent to break down for me, I prefer pseudocode for describing algorithms. But the article makes a very good observation about complexity.
yaro330 2y ago
Every time I see this flowchart I get reminded that Slack casually sends half of my notifications to a sleeping/disabled laptop instead of my phone. I also get reminded that Telegram has one of the simplest notification schemes in existence. Notify last used device -> If still unread after ~30 seconds notify every logged in device. That's it, dead simple, never missed a TG notification.
- akkad33 2y ago
  Or phone ringing violently minutes after I've already picked up the call on my laptop

164 points by CharlesW 2y ago

Lol I rarely received notifications that I expect to. (I've checked my settings and done nothing else to fix it, not tried reproducing behavior nor reporting it to Slack.) Paid server. Android client. Lightly used, in part due to the absence of notifications. It's been over a year that I've missed notifications. More than 50% missed, comments to my threads especially, and also new messages on watched channels.

chatmasta 2y ago
Do you have a bot or script somewhere that’s using your token and appearing to “read” messages before you see them yourself?
orf 2y ago
A notification in this context isn’t a push notification, it’s a Slack notification (a red bubble counter). Sounds like an issue with your android phone.

rpicard 2y ago

Content aside (it’s good too), I love this blog and post visually.

theSuda 2y ago
I had to turn off my Dark Reader to light mode to see it. Yes, this is a very elegant, easy on the eyes and fun to read website/blog. I would like to use this theme unless it is a fully custom site.

deathanatos 2y ago

That complexity in the flow chart is probably just straight bugs, like TFA gets into. For example, I'm sure the flow chart — if you made one — for message "parsing" would be similarly complex. And it shows, on the client, since it feels less like there's a parser, and more like someone has cobbled a bunch of regexes together. There's a number of rather trivial to discover bugs¹, particularly around code block formatting and hyperlinks. That Slack will actively mutates entered text is doubly infuriating. Similarly, complex flowcharts aren't necessarily something to be proud of, rather, something to be eyed with suspicion. Is that complexity essential complexity, or accidental complexity? (Though sometimes it can be infuriatingly difficult to simplify. I've attacked a few such codepaths in my career only to come out going "nope, it's just that terrible/complex.") On notifications, one of the best things I ever set up was making my name a notification trigger. Lets me know when people are talking about me (or even to me), but aren't using a @- tag. Some people just … don't seem to know how to do it? ¹trivial enough that it leaves me wondering: does Slack's own eng use Slack, with cognitive awareness of the things that they run into?

isoprophlex 2y ago
> That Slack will actively mutates entered text is doubly infuriating. Slack is not good with that but man what are the people smoking that designed MS Teams? What the actual fuck happens when you try to type, copy, paste or send a message?! Slack is an oasis of sanity, compared.
- claudex 2y ago
  That's because Teams purpose was to replace Skype. You can't replace Skype with a working tool, it will disturb the users.

xyst 2y ago

I just turn off notifications completely. Horribly implemented notification systems have completely turned me away. DnD on? Nope still get notified. Government sends Amber alert? Yea let’s full send it across the entire state for a crack head vs police incident that occurred 500 miles away at 4AM. Severe weather alerts have now been moved to voice calls and that number whitelisted in my contacts

sethops1 2y ago
I see that you also live in Texas
theideaofcoffee 2y ago
Same, my phone was gradually turning into another point of control over me, rather than the other way around and it being a tool to help me. Only a handful of people are default allowed through DnD, all of the nonsense government alerts are off, almost all app notifications are off save for absolutely the most important ones. If an app somehow breaks through after all of that, it's an instant uninstall, I just don't want to waste any more of my life than I alerady have being subservient to this shit. It's a daily annoyance to have to dismiss popups in apps when they notice they can no longer send notifications. Almost as annoying as the notifications themselves. Most work apps have a permanent 'Away' status and a message on and the expectation set that I sparingly check throughout the day. It works really well, my mind has never been quieter and more at ease.
- dangsux 2y ago
  [dead]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

kibwen 2y ago

I don't know if I'd classify the cleaner diagram as "cheating" per se, but it does trade one kind of complexity for another kind. Removing nodes by adding a concept of implicit branches via "unless" clauses within a node doesn't necessarily make the system any easier to understand at a glance. Sometimes systems have good reason to be complex, and sometimes we have good reasons to hide much of that complexity, but let's not conflate hidden complexity with the lack of complexity. If I were to suggest a way to make the original chart cleaner without changing the quantity of explicit nodes and branches, I would start by reducing it into parts that are cyclic and parts that are acyclic, then drawing clear divisions between those parts. Then you could give these encapsulated bits names and thereby make it easier for them to refer to each other (such as in the duplicated flows between local and global preferences) without having to draw a mess of crisscrossing lines.

NBJack 2y ago
I agree with you; it is hand-wavey and strays into "spherical cows in a vacuum" territory. Practical for discussions, not so great for implementations, where details matter greatly. I would presume the original diagram was meant to align on the specifics; the revised version from the author leaves much to interpretation.
- cushpush 2y ago
  > I expect it is also easier to verify the correctness of and find bugs in my diagram if someone were to want to. This will vary on the language in which it is implemented, right?
IshKebab 2y ago
I think it's ok to combine simple booleans into one box for the same reason we do that in code. You generally write `if a and b { foo }` not `if a { if b { foo } }`.
- nimblegorilla 2y ago
  From my perspective simple boolean means a single known value stored in one variable. I suspect the underlying code performs a number of calculations for each one of the flow chart "booleans". Of course, maybe that points to a design flaw and there should be a single policy instance that aggregates all of the variables into one place.

VyseofArcadia 2y ago

Maybe the real source of complexity in that flowchart is there are just too many ways to suppress notifications. You have muting, do not disturb, do not disturb overrides, @message preferences per channel and global, DM preferences, and so on. I love dials and knobs and sliders in my software, but at some point when they are all for the same feature, there is no longer any way for the user to intuit how they interact.

puzzledobserver 2y ago
I think this is the real question to ask. Does the complicated flowchart point to deficiencies in the Slack user interface? If the user cannot intuit the flowchart, then how can they (as several sibling comments rightly point out) reliably turn notifications on or off? Algorithmic transparency should be a thing, no?
- swatcoder 2y ago
  "Feature flag" development culture is in direct conflict with user's having intuitive, consistent experiences that they can model in their head. If the vendor needs a database report to see what features the user may encounter in any given session, because it's an n-dimensional matrix that changes based on uncountably many factors, there is no mental modeling to be done. The user just experiences some idiosyncratic amalgam of code in each session, and the vendor watches aggregate metrics to make sure the number of users in immediate crisis remains below some threshold -- bringing in a $XXXX/hr on-call team to identify and apply some adequately impactful change if it breaks over. Meanwhile, the users-in-crisis cross their fingers that the next time they open the app, they get a better roll on the feature matrix and encounter a more tolerable subset of issues. If you want to be able to understand your software and know how to turn things on and off, you need to demand a whole new (old) approach to building and publishing things. We're way off track right now.
  - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    Feature flag development culture is the only practical way to do continuous delivery. The old approach is still used in markets where it makes sense - database systems, for example, often have only a handful of releases per year. But there's a lot of markets where it's just not feasible to make customers wait 3-6 months between when you finish developing a feature and when it's available for use.

dakiol 2y ago

I can’t work with notifications enabled. Every hour I work, I make a 15 min pause or so and then I check Slack and answer if needed. Not just Slack, I don’t have any notifications enabled. I always pull. The only exception is phone calls.

ivewonyoung 2y ago
I wish I could do that but rarely I do get something that needs my attention immediately because I don multiple hats including Infrastructure,SRE,DevOps,SysOps,programmer etc.
- anitil 2y ago
  I have a second channel for urgent things, which is a phone call. I've told everyone that I'm available whenever, but they need to pick up the phone and call me. Surprisingly that little bit of friction seems to downgrade issues from 'urgent' to 'we can fix it tomorrow'
  - ivewonyoung 2y ago
    The issue is that sometimes something comes up that I can choose to quickly address and get folks going again. Adding that friction causes waste of time.

LudwigNagasena 2y ago

I look at the first flowchart and think to myself, were all the product managers, business analysts, and UX designers drunk when all of that was getting implemented?

ziml77 2y ago
No. People just interact with these messaging systems in a variety of ways and the notification flow here has to account for that. Each sender might use @s and threads differently and then the recipients might have different tolerances for what they end up seeing notifications for. If you provide fewer options for the recipients, it's far more likely they'll just blanket disable notifications.
- LudwigNagasena 2y ago
  If you provide intractable options, it’s far more likely people will just blanket disable notifications.

taeric 2y ago

I didn't see a previous discussion on the flowchart, so I'm not entirely sure why folks were wrong about it. I do like the updated version. Fun to explore why. First, it is much much more linear. Effectively top down. Directions are consistent in outcome. Left is always "don't" and right is "do." There is no back tracking.

Kwpolska 2y ago

Flowcharts tend to suck when trying to describe anything remotely complicated. I doubt anyone is seriously using the original flowchart to get any work done, the actual code must be more readable, and would be guaranteed to be correct. On the other hand, overloading a flowchart with things like "unless" or "including" makes it harder to follow.

XorNot 2y ago
That flowchart is absolutely what happens when a bunch of programmers got told to "draw the complete system" in one diagram - which is absolutely not how it should've been represented.

satisfice 2y ago

The most important thing to me about the original diagram is that it is underspecified-- you can't determine its meaning just by reading it and also having a basic knowledge of Slack. To understand it you need a close and detailed knowledge of Slack UI and behavior that I don't believe has been officially documented. In fact, I'm left with questions about this diagram I can't answer even after experimenting with Slack. In other words, there is important tacit knowledge required to interpret the logic. I wonder if there is an updated version of this available anywhere?

m463 2y ago

I think slack notifications are complicated, but getting them shows you things you should see, while eliminating garbage distractions. That said, I still get silly @here and @channel stuff sometime even turned off per-channel, and miss some thread notifications. So I wish you could color-code channels/messages/threads to know whether you will be notified and let you tweak things if not. I think a lot of complexity can be visualized and that helps us fragile fallible humans.

hatthew 2y ago

guys I simplified it to a single node in a flowchart, this is even simpler right? (user not DND || message DND override) && ((message in thread && user in thread && user threads_everything) || ((channel notifications everything || (channel notifications unset && global notifications everything)) && ((message not in thread || user in thread) || (message has @channel || (message has @here && user is active)) && @channel messages not muted) || message contains @mention || message contains highlight word || message is on file owned by user))

teeray 2y ago

Slack Flowchart: Should we send a notification? Me: mutes all notifications at the OS for Slack.

Inviz 2y ago

This specific problem is better solved by decomposing the logic into rules that tell when not to send a message. I refactored this diagram once that way, so it becomes absolutely straightforward.

luke_galea 2y ago

I think the slack flowchart is a great example of where declarative programming really shines. You might enjoy this talk about rules engines where I simplify part of Slack's notification logic: https://youtu.be/mDnntrhk-8g?si=K1_8pU-Ck1fsCUM5 https://youtu.be/mDnntrhk-8g?si=K1_8pU-Ck1fsCUM5 Fun stuff!

psd1 2y ago
I will invest that time later. In anticipation, thanks. I came here to see if anyone was talking about state machines that generate their own flowcharts, or codegen from flowcharts. I'd like to know if there's prior art. It would be great for user acceptance. I'm minded to have a go myself, possibly with mermaid as an intermediate description. Stupid? Non-stupid?
- tibor_a 2y ago
  I have similar thoughts but I also didn't have chance to do proper investigation of the prior art :).
  - psd1 2y ago
    Icymi, luke_galea mentioned graphviz in ruby Next challenge: generate fsm from mermaid flow chart!
- luke_galea 2y ago
  There is a library in Ruby to generate graphviz from state machines: https://github.com/state-machines/state_machines-graphviz https://github.com/state-machines/state_machines-graphviz

nlawalker 2y ago

> To me this is way easier to understand. > I know this is not 100% bug-for-bug compatible with the original flowchart. “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/07/17/solution/?amp=1 https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/07/17/solution/?amp=1) (It’s not my intent to be totally dismissive, the author has good points, but I couldn’t resist the pithy but misquoted quote)

doctorpangloss 2y ago

Maybe Slack should stop making an LLM for data mining and chatbots, and instead, deploy an LLM to read a message and determine whether or not you should be notified, because notifications from Slack truly suck.

Terr_ 2y ago

A separate gripe: Still no support for "batching up" a trickle of notifications from a particular DM/channel, which is especially frustrating on the phone-app. *bzzzt* You probably met him, that one guy *bzzzt* who sends messages like this *bzzzt* and each time your phone vibrates for attention *bzzzt* but you never needed to know that soon anyway.

Self-Perfection 2y ago
Telegram does batching for group notifications.
saagarjha 2y ago
I wish my OS did this. And no, not with a LLM “summary”. Just literally rate limit the notifications.
redrove 2y ago
bzzzt Hello * waits 20 minutes * bzzzt How are you? * waits 3-24h * bzzzt Can you help me with XYZ? I answer ASAP I hate these people. It’s such a drain on my mental well being.
- switch007 2y ago
  You can mute people now. Thank god
- Terr_ 2y ago
  I wonder if anyone's done a study on those different styles, clustering them with other things like type of work or personality traits. I anecdotally associate "those people" with either: 1. Job roles (e.g. Sales) or personalities that are accustomed to interactively pushing people to do things for them 2. People who don't feel safe assuming that I can/will help. 3. Someone struggling to describe their problem up front, so they aren't sure what to place in my metaphorical inbox 4. There are multiple people they could reach out to for help, and they're trying to determine which person might react soonest. (But they aren't using other strategies like posting their problem in a channel and @-mentioning multiple potential helpers.) Their problem may or may not merit the kind of latency they're looking for.

fungiblecog 2y ago

Terrible design. This is why I hate modern software. If the devs barely understand it how are the users supposed to.

coldtea 2y ago

Anybody knows how either/both of the flowcharts in the post were made? Is it Mermaid, Graphviz, some other tool/lib, some GUI tool like Visio, Lucid Charts, etc?

jgalt212 2y ago

That flow chart is crazy. It would be quicker to consider and think about every instance on a case by case basis rather than consult that chart. Snark aside, I do think the flowchart could be useful for the QA team to verify, approve, or disapprove of decisions made by the implementation team.

jcgrillo 2y ago

For anything remotely complex flowcharts tent to break down for me, I prefer pseudocode for describing algorithms. But the article makes a very good observation about complexity.

yaro330 2y ago

Every time I see this flowchart I get reminded that Slack casually sends half of my notifications to a sleeping/disabled laptop instead of my phone. I also get reminded that Telegram has one of the simplest notification schemes in existence. Notify last used device -> If still unread after ~30 seconds notify every logged in device. That's it, dead simple, never missed a TG notification.

akkad33 2y ago
Or phone ringing violently minutes after I've already picked up the call on my laptop